Daniel Fox helps brands engineer music that sells.

I am Daniel Fox, the Music Behaviorist. I research how music moves people, design the systems around it, and build the music itself — because music is a lever on behavior that almost no brand manages on purpose, and that is the work. I came to it craft-first: I build the music myself and have played live since I was a kid, so I know sound from the chair where it gets made, watching a room of strangers move the same way at the same moment before I ever went looking for why. I am the founder of Entuned, where the why turned into a business.

Here is the honest map of who works on this question, and why I think it needs someone like me. On one side sit the companies that sell store music. They will tell you music lifts sales, and they are not wrong, but they are also the ones holding the invoice, so the advice arrives with a thumb on the scale. On the other side sit the academics, whose work is careful and real and reaches almost no buyer, because it lives in journals priced for libraries and written for other academics. The result is a field with a solid canon and no recognizable human standing in front of it.

I should say the obvious thing before you do: I sell one of these too. Entuned is mine. The difference I can offer is not that I am neutral, because I am not, it is that I will tell you where the research stops, who the product is wrong for, and how to check me without taking my word for any of it. Entuned is the narrow version of the work. It is for mid-market retailers, more than five stores, who want to test the research in their own rooms and measure it against a control. If that is not you, I will say so, and a fee will not change my answer.

The canon is real, and nobody owns it

The research is good, and it is worth naming the people who built it. Ronald Milliman ran the study everyone still quotes, published in 1982, where slower music in a supermarket slowed shoppers down and lifted what they bought. Areni and Kim put classical music in a wine shop and watched people reach for the pricier bottles. North, Hargreaves and McKendrick played French music and French wine sold, switched to German and the German moved. That is the spine of the whole field, and most people who cite it could not tell you a single one of those names. The canon is real and it is effectively authorless.

It also needs the honest part, the part the vendors leave out. Milliman held in one supermarket in 1982. A 2025 conference paper from VU Amsterdam, looking at about 140 Dutch stores, found the overall tempo effect came back near zero. Both of those things are true at once. Music moves behavior under the right conditions, and getting those conditions right is the entire job. Anyone who quotes Milliman without telling you about the 140 stores is selling you something. I would rather you trust the work than trust me, so I name the authors, the journals, and the limits before I make a claim.

Two scales, and I have stood at both

I do not argue this from theory. At Entuned the work lives on the retail floor, where the music gets fit to a store's actual customers instead of a hunch. At Dizzy Charlie's, a public summer concert series I designed with the founder, the work lives in public space, where the same craft moves a crowd in the open air rather than a shopper down an aisle. One question runs through both: what did the people here come for, and how does music give them room to do it. The retail floor and the public square are the same study at different scales, and I have done the work at both.

The line I will not cross

The thing that unsettles people about this research is the same thing that makes it powerful: the shopper rarely catches it happening. That fact cuts two ways, and the cut is the whole ethic. Music can take the friction out of a choice a person was already moving toward, give them room to do what they walked in to do. The same music, aimed the wrong way, manufactures a want and sells it back to them. I do the first. I will not aim this work to push a person toward something they did not want. Respect for what someone came in wanting is the line between this craft and manipulation, and I keep it in plain sight on purpose.

So here is the hard stop. I will not take a room and tune it to extract from the people standing in it. If the only way a project works is by overriding what a customer actually wanted, it is not a project I will run, and no fee changes that.

If you want to go further: the talks make the argument for a room, the writing works through it on the page, and the contact page is the door.