Director of Music: The Role Leading Brands Are Creating to Stop Sounding Like Everyone Else

When music stopped being "what plays in the background"

In April 2025, Langham Hospitality Group made an announcement that went largely unnoticed in the business press — but one that says everything about where the industry is heading: it created the role of Group Director of Music and filled it with Andrew Grant, a veteran DJ with more than 25 years of experience, former resident at the legendary DC10 club in Ibiza and producer for the Valencia-based label Barraca Music.

The reasoning offered by LHG CEO Bob van den Oord was direct: "Music is a key part of our strategy to elevate our brands and create unforgettable experiences for our guests." He did not talk about ambiance. He did not talk about auditory decoration. He talked about brand strategy.

That move is not an isolated one. It marks a pattern repeating across companies in different industries and of different sizes — one with concrete implications for any business that serves customers in a physical space.

What that role actually means

The position Grant took on at Langham is not that of a playlist manager. The role encompasses a full-spectrum strategy: live performances, collaborations with artists and record labels, exclusive soundscapes for each brand within the group — which includes The Langham Hotels, Cordis, Eaton Workshop, and Ying'nFlo — and differentiated musical programming by space.

To date, Grant has designed specific sonic landscapes for the group's Chuan Spas and T'ang Court restaurants, and has launched multi-year collaborations with music institutions. Each brand in the portfolio sounds different — because it is different.

The philosophy Grant himself articulated puts it well: a hotel's role is not to replace the guest's personal listening habits, but to shape the atmosphere, express the brand's identity, and reflect the culture of the destination. That is a fundamental conceptual shift from simply "playing music."

Taj Hotels followed a similar path, releasing its own set of musical assets through sonic branding specialist Ahmad Haffar. Two luxury hotel chains, two distinct approaches, one shared diagnosis: sound is an asset to be managed, not a detail to be handled by an algorithm.

H&M and the largest brand playlist on Spotify

What Langham did in hospitality, H&M replicated in retail. In June 2025, the Swedish retailer announced that The Sound of H&M — a weekly series uploaded every Friday to Spotify — had become the largest organic brand playlist on the platform. The music not only plays in stores every day: it exists in the digital world as an extension of the brand's identity.

The stated goal of the project is to "capture the essence of H&M" and create "a culturally relevant musical experience that reinforces brand connection." That is not content merchandising. It is brand identity in sonic form, managed by an in-house curation team with its own editorial voice.

The Aviator Nation case points in the same direction. The California-based brand, which returned to the spotlight in 2025, used music actively as the centerpiece of its cultural revival: during the celebration of Grateful Dead's 60th anniversary at Golden Gate Park, Aviator Nation activated its San Francisco store with a custom playlist that fused the brand's vintage aesthetic with the band's iconic sound. The result was customer-generated content across social media and a measurable increase in in-store dwell time.

The numbers that justify the investment

Behind these strategic decisions lies a body of accumulated empirical evidence. The data on music and consumer behavior is consistent:

• Dwell time: A field experiment published in 2024 found that diners exposed to slow-tempo music stayed an average of 80.3 minutes in the restaurant, compared to 57.3 minutes for those listening to fast music — a 40.2% increase in visit duration.
• Sonic congruence and dwell time: When background music aligns with brand identity, in-store dwell time increases by 42.24% compared to the complete absence of music.
• Influence on destination choice: Recent studies indicate that music influences the decision of where to shop or dine in 50% of cases.
• Perception of exclusivity: Research from the University of Oxford suggests that the right music can increase the perceived exclusivity and desirability of a brand.
• Average transaction value: For every additional 15 minutes a customer remains comfortable in the space, average spend increases — a direct relationship documented by dwell time studies in retail and restaurants.

And at the other end of the spectrum: more than half of shoppers leave a store when the music is too loud. Poorly managed sound is not neutral: it carries an active cost in lost customers.

Music as a competitive differentiator, not an amenity

What sets apart the brands winning in this space is a shift in mental category. Music stops being an amenity — something that is "nice to have" — and becomes a competitive differentiator managed with the same seriousness as visual design or spatial architecture.

The logic of sonic congruence is precise: when music matches brand identity, it reinforces purchasing decisions. When it does not, it erodes them. A classic example from the research literature: in a wine shop, playing French music increases sales of French wines; playing German music increases sales of German wines. Sound is not neutral background — it is a silent sales argument operating at all times.

Sonic identities that endure, according to leading practitioners, share four characteristics: they are distinctive (recognizable within two seconds), scalable (they work across all formats and spaces), they have emotional logic (the sound produces what the brand wants the customer to feel before they consciously think it), and they age well (five years later, they still feel like the brand, not like a period piece).

What this means for your space

Not every brand can — or needs to — hire a Group Director of Music. But the underlying logic scales to any size operation.

The first step is to stop treating music as a last-minute decision and start treating it as a brand decision. That means asking: What do we want someone to feel when they walk into our space for the first time? Is that feeling consistent with what our visuals, our service, and our pricing communicate?

The second step is recognizing that ongoing curation matters as much as the initial curation. H&M updates its playlist every Friday. Langham has a dedicated full-time professional. The reason is simple: a static sonic identity becomes invisible. Music that sounds the same every day for months stops being identity and becomes background noise.

That is precisely where services like Mystify Radio — which combine human curation with intelligent programming — offer a real advantage: the ability to keep a sonic identity alive, coherent, and attuned to the rhythms of the space without the business team having to manage it manually.

The question is no longer whether music affects your customers' experience. The evidence from 2025 onward settles that debate. The relevant question is whether your brand is making that decision consciously — or leaving it to chance.