Here’s how café music is influencing your coffee break

Sometimes, we choose music to match our mood — other times, to change it. We might go for fast-paced, lively music to help with a work-out, for example, or to get us going in the morning, but something slow for a romantic dinner.

Psychological research on the impacts of music on how we feel and behave has found that, in fact, different styles of music affect everything from our purchasing decisions in shops to whether we're inclined to linger over lunch. Now, new research in the Journal of Sensory Studies suggests that musical tempo can affect coffee-drinking experiences, too.  

Joanne Pei Sze Yeoh at the University of Putra Malaysia and Charles Spence of the University of Oxford, studied 400 people (half female) who agreed to complete a questionnaire after ordering at least one cup of coffee in a café in Malaysia.  

All of these participants were alone at the time. Half were weekday visitors, while half were surveyed on a weekend. Half of each of these two groups heard an up-tempo playlist (above 120 beats per minute), while for the other half, a slow-tempo music selection (below 80 bpm) was playing in the background.

Yeoh and Spence reasoned that the weekday customers would be more likely to be there for a 'utilitarian' hit of caffeine, while the weekend coffee drinkers would be more interested in the hedonic pleasure of a relaxed cup of coffee. They also suspected that high-tempo music, which increases physiological arousal, and slow-tempo, low-arousal music might have different effects on weekday versus weekend customers.

Their analysis of the survey results revealed that, to some extent, this was the case. Weekday customers who heard slow tempo music gave the highest overall ratings of the quality of their coffee — roughly 18% higher than the customers who heard either slow or fast tempo music at the weekend. These slow tempo weekday customers were also more likely to say that they planned to buy more coffee at the shop in the future.

When it came to ratings for the music, rather than the coffee, weekend customers clearly preferred the slow music, and those who heard it stayed for longer in the cafe than those who heard the high-tempo playlist, the team reports. Only 15% of the fast music weekend customers stayed for longer than two hours, compared with 65% of the slow music group. The researchers interpret this as being because the music matched their relatively relaxed weekend mood.  

Some of these findings contrast with results of earlier studies of coffee consumption that have found that fast, versus slow, tempo music led people to like the products better. However, most of these studies were conducted in the lab or online. A major benefit of doing research in actual coffee shops, the researchers write, is that the participants are exposed to the full, holistic multi-sensory experience, which should mean that the results will more accurately reflect what happens in the real world.

Read the paper in full:
Yeoh, J. P. S., & Spence, C. (2025). Music to My Lips: Effects of Musical Tempo on the Coffee Drinking Experience. Journal of Sensory Studies, 40(2). https://doi.org/10.1111/joss.70040

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