"One principle of music psychology is that faster tempos are more stimulating and cause heart rates to go up," marketing professor James Kellaris points out. "That's true whether you're measuring the pace of disco music and the pulse rates of college students who are dancing, or whether you measure the pace of Tibetan chant and the pulse rates of the monks. Some effects of music are universal."

Music also has been proven to make a difference in a person's perception of whether a store is crowded, a situation most shoppers consider negative, according to Karen Machleit, Kellaris' marketing colleague at the University of Cincinnati. She says that even when only two customers are in a store, it is possible for one to perceive the place as crowded and the other to think the opposite.

"If someone is under a lot of time pressure, or is shopping for an expensive item with lots of features to consider, then they will perceive the store to be more crowded than someone who's not shopping for such a product," the professor notes. "Also, some people just naturally tolerate crowds better than others."

Two types of crowding have been defined in marketing studies. Spatial crowding refers to the store itself: the way the merchandise is arranged, the width of the aisles and all other aspects that can be controlled by the retailer. Human crowding refers to the number of persons actually in the store -- the kind of crowding that merchants generally applaud.

"One of the things we found in our research is that spatial crowding has a much stronger effect on shopping satisfaction than human crowding does," Machleit says. "So retailers need to be concerned about how much space people have to move about in a store. People perceive that to be under the merchant's control, and will blame them if they don't have enough."

Human crowding is one circumstance where adjusting ambient music seems to make a difference, according to the researcher. Combine a lot of shoppers with very loud music -- think "Jingle Bell Rock" during the Christmas shopping crunch -- and the store will seem even more crowded than it is. But playing slow music when just a few customers are in a store also makes shoppers uncomfortable.

"We found that people evaluate a store most positively -- and this is a little bit different than their perceptions of crowding -- when there is either fast tempo music and not a lot of people shopping, or where there are a lot of people and slower tempo music," the professor points out.

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