Hotel lobby music: what to play in every hotel space

Hotel lobby music has to let the person arriving and the person welcoming them talk. I would start at reception: if you have to raise your voice to hand over a key, the music is too loud. For arrivals I would choose instrumental tracks with few sudden changes, and save the movement for the bar in the evening.

Tempo also changes how long people stay at the table. In an experiment published in December 2024 across 282 tables, dinner lasted 80.3 minutes on average with slow music and 57.29 with fast. The bill hardly moved. So decide what sort of evening you want your guests to have, then choose the pace.

With the moments of the day. Someone arriving off a flight and someone having breakfast before a hike need different things. I would write a few lines for the team: what the guest should hear, how loud, and at what time the selection changes.

On 20 October 2026 we counted which moments the 31 tracks Lumina has composed for 31 hotels were written for. 19 are for breakfast or early morning, Coffee by the Lake for Hotel Belvedere in Bellagio among them. Only 4 are for the evening.

Breakfast is when nearly every guest is in the same room, so I would give it the care usually kept for the bar. Every track on the Music page has a 45-second preview: listen to it, because a title alone won’t tell you.

With one simple test: a sentence said in a normal voice has to carry across the desk. Try it from the guest’s side and from the receptionist’s. The armchair under the speaker and the one at the far end of the room can feel like 2 different hotels.

Among Lumina’s tracks for arrivals are Felt Piano, First Light, composed for Casa Angelina in Praiano, and Afternoon Through the Halls, for Grand Hotel Tremezzo. Listen to them with your own lobby in mind.

I would test at the worst moment: the phone ringing and a family at the desk. The music is right if the receptionist can carry on explaining the stay without competing with a chorus. That is why I would start with instrumentals, and add a voice only in the lounge, and only if it really earns its place.

Breakfast music should go along with people waking up without pushing everyone to the same speed. I would open with a few instruments and a light beat, and bring in more movement as the room fills: the pace that suits someone leaving at 7 can grate on someone down for a second coffee.

Among the tracks on the Music page you can compare breakfasts in very different places:

Play them with your own breakfast room in mind. I would keep the one that stands up to the clatter of cups and still leaves room for a chat, and build the rest of the selection around that sound.

It makes them stay longer, not necessarily spend more. As far back as 1986, Ronald Milliman found that tempo changed how long diners stayed and how much they drank at the bar. The 2024 study by Malcman, Azar, Shavit and Rosenboim shows where that effect stops.

The researchers followed 282 tables of 1 or 2 adults in an Italian restaurant in central Tel Aviv. They split the days into 3 conditions: slow music, up to 72 beats a minute, fast music, from 94 up, or the usual playlist, all at the same volume.

The surprise is in the tips: they were higher with fast music. For a dinner where you want to leave time for pudding I would try a slower selection; if guests are waiting and tables need turning, I would look first at how long the service takes. Turning the volume up to move people on is something I would never do. Among Lumina’s dinner tracks are After-Hours Organ Glow for Hôtel Fauchon Paris and Evening in the Salon for Villa Cimbrone in Ravello.

The character of the place. In a 2017 HUI study of 16 chain restaurants in Stockholm, run with Soundtrack Your Brand, music chosen to fit the brand brought in 9.1% more revenue than music that did not fit.

On its research page Soundtrack adds that the study covered 1.8 million purchases over 5 months, and that random hits sold 4.3% less than silence. The study was done with the company that sells the music, so I would use it to set up a test in your own bar, not to bank on the 9.1%.

For a quiet aperitif I would prepare a different selection from the one for a busy night, with one person in charge of the volume and a set time for the switch. Among Lumina’s tracks, Vibraphone at Nightfall was composed for the evening at Giardino Ascona.

From the guest’s seat, then at the spots where someone works for hours. The number on the amplifier dial tells you nothing about how loud it is next to a speaker. I would set a starting level and let the shift manager turn it down when the room changes.

Volume matters on its own, too. In Biswas, Lund and Szocs’s 2019 study, people chose healthier food with music or noise at low volume than at high volume. No study gives you the right level for a lobby, but it deserves the same care as the lighting and the tables.

Walk round with the team: the desk, the table under the speaker, the far armchair, the corridor to the rooms. Note where a question has to be repeated, where the bass drowns the tune and where the sound vanishes. If making one area audible deafens another, the problem is where the speakers are, not the playlist.

The spa needs continuity; the pool depends on what guests are doing there. During a treatment I would avoid vocals, insistent percussion and jumps in volume. By a pool where people read and doze I would play something calmer than by one where they have an aperitif.

I would start in the quietest room and walk towards the liveliest, because open doors matter: a workout track can reach the massage room. Among Lumina’s tracks, Shaker on the Terrace was composed for morning workouts and yoga at Borgo Santandrea, on the Amalfi Coast.

Pools and gyms often need a licence of their own. In the UK, PPL’s 2026 background-music tariff for hotels, bars and restaurants leaves them out and charges them separately. The comparison across 8 countries is in our guide to music licences for hotels.

Long enough to cover the shift without repeating, with a few spares to drop. Do the sum with the real lengths: with 4-minute tracks, 8 hours without a repeat needs 120 tracks; with 20 tracks, the loop restarts after 80 minutes.

The people who notice are behind the desk. Kilpiö and Kytö, in 2021, studied the music people hear at work without having chosen it, with 747 answers to a questionnaire and 66 interviews with staff of a shopping centre in Tampere. The colleague who hears it all shift knows things a passing guest never will: ask which tracks start to grate, which jump in volume and which come round too soon.

With Lumina Music the first tracks are free; after that each request composes 10 tracks for a space, 5 pieces in 2 versions, for 10 credits. 120 credits cost €18 or $20, 350 cost €45 or $50: with the largest pack a track comes to about 13 cents. The tracks composed for your hotel are yours for good, with no royalties to pay on them.

Try it in the same room, at the same hour, with one problem in mind. I would pick just one: it is hard to talk at the desk, the playlist repeats, or dinner runs longer than the service can take. Change one thing at a time and ask the team what difference they hear.

In the restaurant, note the arrival time, the time of the bill, the covers and the total. The 2024 study shows why you need both the minutes and the bill: 23 extra minutes at dinner did not bring a bigger bill. And compare similar weeks, because a quiet Tuesday and a full Saturday change everything on their own.

Then say on your website what guests will find, if it helps them choose: the DJ in the bar on Fridays, the silent lounge, the pool with music. In our study of 3,288 answers from ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, when a traveller asks about the trip rather than the hotel, the great hotels all but disappear; details that describe the evening are what bring them back into the trip.

The room where the music already bothers someone, and the colleague who hears it longest. At reception I would try quiet instrumentals; at breakfast more variety; at dinner and in the bar I would set the pace by the evening you want. The 282 tables of 2024 say slow music lengthens dinner, not that it makes you more money.

Listen to a few of Lumina’s 31 tracks, then ask for one for a room in your hotel. First, though, sort out the source: personal Spotify can’t be used in a hotel. And on the day of the test, spend a few minutes where your colleagues work: if they can talk, listen and get to the end of the shift without wanting to switch it all off, you are on the right track.