Walk into any Ace Hotel in the world and something will feel immediately familiar before you've checked in, ordered a drink, or spoken to anyone at the front desk. The lobby sounds a certain way. Not just pleasant but also intentional. That's not an accident. It's the result of a deliberate decision to treat music as a brand asset, the same way a logo or a color palette is a brand asset. And while this kind of thinking has been standard practice among global hospitality and retail brands for years, it's still a largely untapped opportunity in the Indonesian market.
The shift happening globally is worth paying attention to. Brands are moving away from the idea of a playlist which is a rotating set of songs that fills silence toward what's now being called a sonic identity: a consistent musical language that shows up the same way across every location, every touchpoint, every time of day. Research from the Audio Branding Academy found that consistent sonic identity across customer touchpoints significantly increases brand recognition and emotional connection, with some studies showing music-driven brand recall running as high as 96% compared to visual branding alone. The feeling a guest gets when the music is coherent and considered isn't just pleasant but it's memorable in a way that brings them back.
What makes this particularly interesting is how specific the craft has become. Leading hospitality brands now think about tempo as a function of the guest journey to bring more energetic in arrival areas where first impressions are formed, softer and more settled in dining or lounge spaces where guests are meant to slow down. Genre signals positioning without a single word being spoken: a boutique property playing carefully selected jazz communicates something entirely different from one playing top 40, even if the rooms are identical. Volume gets calibrated to the hour. The playlist shifts between morning and evening not because someone remembered to change it, but because the system was designed that way from the start.
For Indonesian businesses such as cafés, restaurants, hotels, retail spaces represents a genuinely open lane. Most local competitors are still treating music as an afterthought, something to fill silence rather than something to build with. A business that starts treating its sound as seriously as its interior design or its menu is making a quiet but durable investment in how customers perceive and remember it. The guests might not be able to articulate why your space feels more considered than the one next door. But they will feel it, and more importantly, they will come back because of it.
Sources: Audio Branding Academy. (2023). Audio branding barometer 2023. | Spence, C. (2024). Sonic branding: A narrative review at the intersection of art and science. Psychology & Marketing. | Morin, S., et al. (2007). Background music pleasure and store evaluation: Intensity effects and psychological mechanisms. Journal of Business Research, 60(10), 1000–1008.