Writing

Essays & research notes.

Essays on music, creativity, and what AI is doing to both. Plus research notes on how sound moves behavior, built on the studies that measured it.

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Store music and customer behavior: what the research shows

Forty years of studies on how store music moves dwell, basket size, spend, and how premium a store feels. The honest read on what holds up, what doesn't, and why music is the one variable most retailers never manage.

For retail leaders

The questions behind the floor

Store music and retail media

The industry calls in-store audio the blind spot of the retail-media boom. The most behaviorally powerful channel in the store plays to everyone and is owned by no one.

Make your stores feel more premium

Every premium answer is visual. The music does the same work, gets none of the credit, and is the one signal a screen cannot copy.

Compete with your own website

A store's one uncopyable edge is the feel of a real room, and music is the part of that feel almost no retailer manages.

Increase dwell time

Layout, signage, and staffing all chase dwell. The one input that sets pace, the music, gets left on shuffle.

The ROI of in-store experience

The highest-ratio lever you own is already playing and nearly free to get right. The honest move is to measure it, not promise a number.

Essays

On music, creativity & the machine

Essay

The rooms that can't say no

Behavioral music is heading into hospitals, care homes, classrooms, and transit. A case for a permission ethic in the rooms where people can least leave or say no, with an honest look at what the research supports.

Essay

Designing for Permission

The right sound in a room takes the friction out of what a person already wants to do, and respect for that person's agency is the line between this work and manipulation.

Essay

Two and a Half Buttons

A shopper carries a need, an identity, and a value at once; touch enough of them at the same time and they feel met, and music is often the half button that confirms it.

Essay

Permission to Move

Daniel turned a jazz booking agency into a season-long public concert series, designing the genres, the dance area, and the crowd so a store's permission to buy became a park's permission to move and connect.

Every room is already scored

Sound is the input in a space that moves people the most and gets chosen the least. Retail keeps the receipt. The mechanism runs everywhere, and it is about to get designed.

Your worth was never the work

The threat creators feel from AI is real, and pointed at the wrong thing. On separating who you are from your facility with a language.

Soul is an artifact, not a substance

An AI wrote a song that made me cry. What that says about "soul," and about how good we assumed we were.

Catch the good accident

Most originality, in people and in machines, is an accident someone paid enough attention to keep. Cobain, chance, and taste as the real skill.

The fool's errand

The grievance against generative AI is real and mostly correct. The conclusion people draw from it is the part that fails.

Research notes

How music moves customer behavior

Browse the full research-note library →

Why Do Some People Get Chills From Music and Others Don't?

Why do some people get chills from music and other people feel nothing? You know the moment — a song hits a certain point and a shiver runs up the back of your neck, your arms prickle, something in your chest goes tight for a second.

The Mozart Effect Is a Myth — Here's What Happened

Does listening to Mozart make you smarter? You've probably heard that it does — play classical music to a baby and you build a sharper brain, put the right sonata on before an exam and you score higher.

Why You Love a Song More the Second Time

Why do you love a brand-new song more the second time you hear it? It did nothing for you on the first pass — and a few plays later you can't turn it off.

How Do You Increase Dwell Time in a Store?

How do you get people to stay longer in a store — not visit more often, but linger on a single trip, because the longer someone is on the floor the more they tend to see and buy? Retailers call it dwell time, and they spend a fortune chasing it with layout, signage, and staff placement.

Do Binaural Beats Actually Work?

Do binaural beats actually work? You put on headphones, play two slightly different tones — one in each ear — and the claim is your brainwaves sync up so you focus harder or stress less.

There Are Exactly 8 Ways Music Makes You Feel Something

How does music actually make you feel something — not which songs are sad or happy, but the mechanism? The psychologist Patrik Juslin spent years on exactly that, and his answer is weirdly specific: there aren't a hundred ways music moves you.

How Do You Make a Store Feel Premium?

How do you make a store feel premium? Every answer comes back to something you can see — lighting, fixtures, materials, staff.

Does Store Music Actually Affect Sales?

Does the music in a store actually change what you buy? Yes — but it's smaller and stranger than the headline you've heard.

How does music affect customer behavior in retail?

The umbrella view: how sound moves pace, product choice, emotion, brand perception, and dwell time, all at once.

Does music actually affect retail sales, or is it a myth?

Yes, but conditional. A 38 percent supermarket effect, a 140-store null result, and the honest reconciliation.

What music should I actually play in my store?

The research answer isn't a genre. It's fit: music customers like, that suits the brand, matched to the moment.

What's the right music tempo for a retail store?

Slow versus fast, and why the largest study ever run found no overall effect. It depends on key, crowding, and customer.

Does slow music really make people shop longer?

The most repeated claim in retail audio, where it comes from, and the conditions the slogan skips.

When does fast music help a store, and when does it backfire?

Fast music has one job it does well. Crowded store, fast tempo. Empty store, it rushes people toward the door.

What is dwell time, and why does it predict sales?

The metric that forecasts spending better than foot traffic, and how music adds about eight minutes to it.

Is your store's music driving customers out the door?

Silence, familiar hits, and the wrong tempo all shorten visits. The ways music pushes people out.

Why the first five minutes in your store decide the sale

The pleasure a customer feels in the first five minutes predicts how much they'll spend without planning to.

How does music set the mood in a store?

Pleasure is the gateway emotion. Why the right feeling for the room beats just playing something happy.

What kind of music triggers impulse buying?

Impulse isn't weak willpower. It's triggered, and coherence with the rest of the store matters more than intensity.

Can the right music make customers pay more?

Same product, higher price accepted, but only for experiential goods and only when the shopper already feels good.

Can music make your store feel more expensive?

Genre, volume, and brand fit each move how premium a store feels, and a bad fit actively destroys value.

Can store music change which products people pick?

French music sells French wine five to one. Musical priming, working below conscious awareness.

Does store music influence shoppers without them noticing?

Eighty-six percent swore the music didn't affect them. The sales data said otherwise.

Each note is the written version of a filmed research breakdown. Watch the series on YouTube →