Guests Don’t Want Your Playlist (They Want the Feeling They Can Take Home)

A guest hears something at lunch, pulls out a phone, and Shazams it. Later, at the front desk, someone asks whether the lobby music exists anywhere they can find it. A week after checkout, that same track turns up in a playlist they made for a friend, sitting between two songs that have nothing to do with your hotel.

This happens constantly, and hotels have noticed. The playlist-as-souvenir is now an established marketing idea: put the property’s music on Spotify, link it in the post-stay email, watch the follower count.

But guests don’t set out wanting a playlist. They want the feeling a place gave them. They can’t pack the designer couch or the mood lighting they spent an evening under. But the song travels.

The music is the point of view they can take with them.

So it’s the most portable thing you build, and the only piece a guest carries out on their own. But that only happens if what they heard inside was worth remembering.

Music is the only design element that never stops moving

Music runs through nearly every point of contact a guest has with a property: the Instagram Reel watched before booking, check-in, the first impression of the lobby, late-morning breakfast, the bar at seven, the pool, the spa, the room, the email sent after checkout. Most properties treat that as one decision made once. 

A point of view is not a one-time decision.

Music is also the only design element that changes hour by hour. Interiors are fixed. Lighting shifts a little around dusk. Music is the live layer, and it’s the one most often left on a default setting: the same six-hour block, if you’re lucky, looping from 7am to midnight. A guest who has coffee at nine and a drink at nine thirty hears the same song twice in one day and files your hotel under generic.

If you’re lucky enough for them to come back next year, they’ll probably hear the exact same thing.

The fixes are surprisingly clear. Break the day into blocks that follow what guests are actually doing, and make the transitions gradual. Give F&B its own identity instead of piping the lobby through it: a landmark restaurant study found that slowing the tempo alone stretched the average meal from 45 to 56 minutes and lifted drink orders by roughly 40 percent¹. That’s not ambiance, that’s an operating lever. Decide who is allowed to touch the volume and put it in writing, because one bartender with a phone can undo a year of work in a single shift.

The only brand element guests volunteer to share

Now the part marketing people should care about most: sonic identity is the rare brand element a guest volunteers to carry into their own life and put in front of their friends. Nobody shares your furniture selection. Nobody sends a chair to a group chat. The effect is measurable: one in three young adults say they feel more favorable toward brands with a distinct sonic identity, and a fifth say it makes them more likely to buy². A good playlist travels with your name on it, passed around by people under no obligation to do it.

Here’s a test you can run this week without a budget. Take your property’s music and imagine it playing in a competitor’s lobby down the street. Would anyone notice the difference?

If the answer is no, look behind the playlist. What’s missing is the process that should have shaped one.

What commissioning our own soundtrack taught us

We learned something we didn’t expect: we couldn’t brief it.

We started where most properties start. Genres, a few reference tracks, tempo notes, a list of things to avoid. Clay kept pulling us back to a different question: not what do you want this to sound like, but what someone should feel in the room where it plays. That question is harder, and it’s the only one that produces something a competitor can’t copy.

Bespoke Sound built the agency a soundtrack: two hours of sun-warmed disco and deep house that carry the same point of view we bring to every project, built for the season and not looped for the year. None of it came out of a genre list. You can listen here.

In short, a real sonic identity works as a filter, not just a playlist. So run the test this week. Play your music, and if nothing changes, it’s time to decide what your property is supposed to feel like. Guests will take something home either way. Will it have your name on it?

^{1. Milliman, R.E. (1986). “The Influence of Background Music on the Behavior of Restaurant Patrons.” Journal of Consumer Research, 13(2), 286–289.
Caldwell, C., & Hibbert, S.A. (2002). “The influence of music tempo and musical preference on restaurant patrons’ behavior.” Psychology & Marketing, 19(11), 895-917.}

^{2. Spence, C. (2024). “Sonic branding: A narrative review at the intersection of art and science.” Psychology & Marketing (Wiley).}