Can the right music make customers pay more?

Can the right music make someone pay more for the exact same product? I mean pay a higher price for the same thing, rather than buy more units or add items to the cart. The research says yes, with a condition most people skip right past.

The oldest finding is that people trade up

A 1993 study in Advances in Consumer Research alternated classical music and top 40 in a wine store. With classical playing, shoppers bought the same number of bottles and picked more expensive ones, so the same number of transactions produced a higher average ticket. The music shifted what people reached for once they were at the shelf.

Confirmed in restaurants

A 2003 study in Environment and Behavior tested it over dinner. With classical music, diners spent the most, with pop a little less, and no music came in roughly level with pop, so pop added nothing over silence and classical added about 10 percent.

The condition almost everyone misses

A 2025 study in Marketing Letters found classical music raises the maximum price someone will pay, but only under two conditions. First, the product has to be hedonic, experiential and pleasure-driven: specialty food, wine, candles, artisan goods. For utilitarian products, batteries, cleaning supplies, it did nothing. Second, and this is the one that matters most, the shopper had to already be feeling high pleasure. Without the good feeling first, there's no lift. Willingness to pay is a sequence, where you create pleasure and then the ceiling rises, and if you skip the first step the music is just noise.

The same channel as the thermostat

A 2014 study in the Journal of Consumer Psychology makes the mechanism vivid from outside music. Physical warmth, literally a warmer room, raised willingness to pay by 10 to 36 percent through the same emotional route: comfort loosens spending. Your sound system and your thermostat are working the same pathway, which is a reason to plan them together.

The actual point

Music can lift willingness to pay by 10 percent or more, but only for experiential products and only when the customer already feels good. The mechanism is pleasure rather than sophistication, and classical is simply very good at creating a certain kind of pleasure in the right store.

This is one thread of a bigger picture. The full field guide on store music and customer behavior sets the research in order, and if you want the money side, here's the ROI of in-store experience.