Premium is partly the music.
Ask how to make your stores feel more premium and every answer comes back to something you can see. The one premium signal a screen cannot reproduce is the one nobody on the team owns.
When a brand decides its stores should feel more premium, the plan that comes back is always visual. Better lighting. Heavier fixtures. Real materials instead of laminate. Fewer things on the floor, set further apart. Staff in better clothes who approach you differently. All of it is sound thinking and all of it is expensive, and all of it leaves out the one element that has been playing every hour the doors are open, reaching every person who walks in, doing the same work as the lighting and getting none of the credit for it.
I came to this as a working musician, which means I think about a room from the chair where the sound gets made. So when I walk a floor that someone has spent a fortune making look expensive, I notice that the music is usually the part nobody touched. It shipped on a head-office playlist and it has sat there since the rollout. The brand spent a year specifying what the customer would see and left what she would hear on the default. That is a strange thing to do, because what she hears is setting the price in her head as much as what she sees is.
The evidence is cleaner than people expect
Areni and Kim ran the test that makes this concrete. They put classical music in a wine shop, then switched it to top-40, and watched what people pulled off the shelf. With the classical playing, shoppers moved toward the more expensive bottles. Same store, same wine, same prices. The only thing that changed was what was in the air, and it moved the bottle people felt comfortable buying. Nobody on the floor announced an upgrade. With classical in the air, the better bottle felt like the obvious one to pick up, and people picked it up.
North and Hargreaves found the mechanism underneath it. They played French music in a wine aisle and French wine sold. They switched to German music and the German bottles moved. The music matched what people already associated with the bottle, and the match made the choice feel obvious. That is the whole point and it is the part most brands get wrong when they hear this. Fit is the lesson. Classical worked in the wine shop because it agreed with what the shopper already believed about the bottle, and it would do nothing in a room that sells something else. The match is the move, and the match is particular to what you sell.
Why this is the cheapest premium signal you have
Set the music beside the rest of the premium budget. New fixtures are capital and weeks of fit-out. Better materials run through every store in the fleet. A staffing standard is a hiring and training cost that never ends. The music is none of that. It is already playing. The cost is choosing it on purpose instead of leaving it on shuffle, which is a decision, not a renovation. You are paying for the speakers either way. Most brands are getting a flat playlist out of equipment that could be setting the price ceiling in the customer's head.
It also does something the visual budget cannot. A customer can pull up your product on her phone and see the same photographs, the same materials, the same fixtures rendered better than your store will ever light them. What she cannot get on the phone is the room. The screen flattens everything to a feed. Sound is the part of the premium signal that does not survive the trip through a screen, which makes it exactly the element worth owning when the job is to give a person a reason to stand in your store instead of scrolling past it.
What this asks of a serious operator
Treat the music as a thing the brand owns and chooses, on the same list as the lighting and the materials, instead of a thing that happens to be playing. Then accept the harder part. There is no genre that means premium. What lifts the perceived value of your store depends on the brand it sits inside, on who is actually on the floor at eleven in the morning versus six at night, and on what those people already associate with what you sell. Fit is the entire game and fit is specific to your room. That is what a music behaviorist works out: what your customers came in believing, what sound agrees with it, and whether the choice moved against a control or just felt good in the meeting.
You can read the whole case, including where these effects hold and where they fall apart at scale, in the field guide on store music and customer behavior. The short version for a leader deciding where the next premium dollar goes: before you spec another fixture, pull up what is playing across your stores right now and ask who chose it and what they chose it for. Most of the time the answer is that nobody did.
If you want to work that out for a room, the talks lay out the argument, and the door is here.