Radio for restaurants and bars

A restaurant's music has to do something no other kind of background audio does: change completely, several times, inside one working day, in a room whose whole purpose is conversation.

Brunch, lunch service, the dead middle of the afternoon, early dinner with families in, late dinner, and then — in a lot of venues — a bar that becomes a different business entirely at ten o'clock. Six characters, one room, and the only thing standing between them and each other is usually whoever is closest to the phone behind the pass.

The service-period schedule

The reason to run a venue's audio as a scheduled station rather than a playlist is that a playlist has no idea what time it is.

Breakfast and brunch. Bright, warm, low. People are reading and waking up. Nothing with a drop in it.

Lunch service. Slightly up in energy, still comfortably under conversation. Turnover matters at lunch and a flat room slows it.

Afternoon. The quietest and most neglected slot. Cafés live here; restaurants often have almost nobody in. Instrumental, jazz, warm, unmetered.

Early dinner. Families, older guests, first sittings. Familiar and unobtrusive.

Late dinner. The room fills and the noise floor rises with it. Music that worked at six is inaudible at nine — which is where most venues go wrong, because the answer is not simply louder.

Late bar. A different business. Higher energy, higher volume, and usually the point at which the music stops being background and starts being the reason people stayed.

Six periods, seven days, and a different shape on a Friday than on a Tuesday. That is a schedule, and it is why hospitality is one of the strongest cases for a station platform: it is set once and then it happens.

Volume, and the thing everyone gets wrong

The noise floor in a full restaurant is much higher than in an empty one, so music that was perfectly judged at six in the evening genuinely does disappear at nine.

The instinct is to turn it up. The problem is that this starts a loop: louder music makes guests raise their voices, raised voices raise the noise floor, and the music needs to go up again. Rooms that end up shouting at each other got there one small volume increase at a time, and once a room is in that state nothing recovers it inside a service.

Two things actually help.

Change the music, not just the level. Denser, more rhythmic material cuts through a busy room at a lower volume than something sparse. A schedule that shifts character at the busy hours is doing most of the work that volume was being asked to do.

Fix the loudness inconsistency first. A library assembled from many sources jumps between tracks — one shouting, the next inaudible — and staff respond by setting the volume for the loudest one, which means everything else is too quiet, which means somebody turns it up. Levelling every track to a consistent loudness removes the reason anyone touches the knob. It is the single highest-value change in venue audio and it is invisible when it works.

Then set a ceiling and lock it.

Announcements: mostly don't

Restaurants are the one hospitality setting where the station's own voice is usually a mistake.

A guest sitting at a table for ninety minutes is a captive audience, and a promotional message aimed at them lands as an interruption to a meal they are paying for. The venues that do it well use it very sparingly and only for things a guest genuinely benefits from knowing: the bar is open until one, there is a set menu on Sundays, the terrace is open.

Bars are different. A bar late in the evening tolerates and sometimes wants the venue's voice — the event on Thursday, the new taproom, the DJ next Friday.

The rule that holds in both: if it sounds like an advert, it does not belong in a room where somebody is eating.

Live nights and handover

A venue with live music or a DJ needs the scheduled station to get out of the way and come back by itself.

That is exactly what a station platform does. A DJ connects their own software, the automation ducks out, and the moment they disconnect at two in the morning the station resumes with whatever the schedule says should be playing — which, at that hour, is usually the closing-up music. Nobody has to remember to switch anything back on, and the venue is never left in silence because somebody unplugged a laptop and went home.

Each DJ gets their own credential, so access can be handed out for one night and revoked afterwards.

Multiple sites

For a group, the same argument as every other multi-site operator: one schedule, built once, playing in every venue, so a brand actually sounds like a brand and a seasonal change happens everywhere in the same week rather than eventually.

Local variation becomes a deliberate exception rather than the default state of a business where every general manager has different taste.

Licensing: the honest version

Playing recorded music in a restaurant, bar, café or pub is a public performance and requires a licence. Every venue, every size, every genre.

In the UK, TheMusicLicence from PPL PRS Ltd covers both rights in one, priced on capacity and how the music is used — a bar where music is central pays more than a café where it is background.

In the US, licences come from the performing rights organisations: ASCAP, BMI, SESAC and potentially GMR. There is a narrow statutory exemption for smaller premises playing an ordinary radio or television receiver, with square-footage conditions — roughly 3,750 square feet for food and drink establishments. It applies to receiving a broadcast on ordinary equipment. It does not apply to a streamed station of your own, and a venue that switches from a radio on a shelf to an in-house stream loses the exemption without necessarily realising it.

Consumer streaming services are prohibited in commercial premises by their own terms. This is the most common licensing exposure in hospitality, because a phone behind the bar is the path of least resistance in every venue that has not thought about it.

Licensing is not included in any station platform's fee. The play log is, and it is what the societies ask for.

What it costs

• Platform — $10–40 a month per venue, less per site across a group.
• Playback hardware — a small streaming player into your existing amplifier, $50–100. Multi-zone venues need one per zone.
• Licensing — the real recurring cost, and one already owed regardless of source.

An independent restaurant is looking at under $50 a month of infrastructure.

Mistakes that show up

Setting the volume once. A room at six and a room at nine are different rooms. Schedule the change; do not leave it to whoever is nearest.

Music that jumps in loudness. The root cause of almost every volume complaint in hospitality. Level the library and the problem disappears.

The same playlist every shift. Staff hear it forty hours a week. A rotation small enough for a chef to predict is small enough for a regular to notice.

Vocals in a quiet dining room. Lyrics compete with conversation in a way instrumental music does not. Worth reserving for the busier periods.

A phone behind the bar. Licensing exposure, no schedule, and a member of staff's personal taste running your dining room.

Forgetting the toilets and the terrace. Both are guest spaces, both are silent in most venues, and both are cheap to add.

Frequently asked questions

Do restaurants and bars need a music licence?

Yes. Playing recorded music where customers can hear it is a public performance requiring a licence in essentially every jurisdiction — TheMusicLicence in the UK, performing-rights licences in the US. It applies regardless of venue size or how the music is played.

Can I use Spotify in my restaurant?

No. Consumer streaming services prohibit commercial use in their terms, and the subscription conveys no public performance right. It is the most common licensing exposure in the sector.

Does the US homestyle exemption cover my bar?

Only in narrow circumstances: an ordinary radio or television receiver, within square-footage limits, with conditions on the number of speakers. Streaming your own station is outside it entirely, as is any service you subscribe to.

How loud should restaurant music be?

Below the level at which guests raise their voices. If diners at the same table are leaning in, it is too loud — and the fix at busy times is usually denser music rather than more volume, because raising the level starts a feedback loop with the room's own noise.

Can a DJ take over the venue's stream on a Friday night?

Yes. They connect their own software with their own credential, the schedule ducks out, and it resumes automatically when they disconnect — so the venue is never left in silence at closing time.