Land-based casinos are vibrant environments, which are very carefully planned to keep players engaged and to forget that there are even exit doors. The layout of the casino floor, the carpet design and the lack of clocks are all part of the psychology that influences players to get deeply immersed in the casino.
There is also an important sonic tapestry woven into the environment through ambient music, accompanying the busy soundscape coming from slots and table games. Switch over to the world of online gambling, and casino platforms lack the background scores that land-based ones have.
They don’t have any of the same physical or psychological cues that their land-based counterparts have and instead take a different approach to attracting players, like providing promotional casino offers, a variety of payment options and a searchable library of games. Online casino sites also provide fantastic convenience compared to land-based ones, but should they introduce a bit of music to play along to as well?
Why Do Casinos Use Background Music?
Land-based casinos employ music to create a bit of atmosphere in the room. It’s far better to have something going to fill the space than just have people walking into a space which feels dull and uninviting. If you walked into a party with no ambience, it would be weird and awkward. In contrast, having background music would help lighten the mood and get people into the swing of things.
Typically, casinos use smooth jazz and gentle classical tunes to create their soundscape. Any kind of soft, instrumental music works well in this world, because it’s inoffensive, comfortable and gives an air of welcoming sophistication and relaxation. But there is a psychological trick to the choice of music as well, and that’s because slow continuous music has been found to cause people to lose their sense of time, and that’s exactly what the casino wants.
A Surprising Choice?
Surprisingly, up-tempo music isn’t used as a soundscape in a casino. Up-tempo music is great for running and exercise because it syncs the body and brain to action, and portrays a sense of urgency and high energy. So it’s natural to think that this is what the casino would go for, because people in a high-energy mood would probably bet faster.
Although often going unnoticed, this does happen, as casinos will pump out slightly faster music around slot machines, while keeping the slower tempo chilled, to the table games where players are trying to think and use strategy.
Online Casino Tunes?
So should online casinos welcome players with an immediate burst of background music? The answer is probably not. It would be an annoying element if people just opened their favourite online casino app while sitting on the train and suddenly got startled by music playing because they hadn’t turned their sound down.
What about the option to toggle background music on and off? That’s a more viable option, but probably one that wouldn’t get utilised very much. A lot of players, whether it’s on a computer or a phone, probably already have their own headphones or earphones filled with their favourite music, or even a podcast or audiobook.
If a player had to forgo their own choice of audio pleasures because there was unwanted background music playing, it could cause a lot of frustration. Players may still want to hear the sounds of the slot machine they are playing, for example, but along with their favourite audiobook, so throwing background music into the mix would likely be too much.
Game sounds could also cause a clash with any background music, making the experience a little distracting. So, bombarding players at an online casino with unwanted music as they are trying to play could be problematic and potentially why it’s not commonly done. But there’s another consideration as well – performance.
Performance Levels
Players want seamless experiences at online casinos. Anything unnecessary that will increase page load times and data transfer times, like forced music, could negatively impact user experience, particularly on mobile devices.
But there is perhaps a space for this idea. The home page of an online casino site could introduce a little light jazz, which probably wouldn’t be too much of an issue for people. But even that could be a little annoying and pointless if a player then immediately jumps into a high-energy video slot for a completely different soundscape.
Whatever’s playing on the home page would then have no relevance thematically or in tempo to slot machines, so again, it loses purpose.
Choice
Maybe the way would be to offer a choice of controls so that players could use background music if they wanted to. Just like changing a site language is possible, an option to choose the genre of music, like Lo-Fi Beats, Up-beat Vibes, or Smooth Jazz, could be a useful feature, as well as sound level controls and the option to mute the music altogether. But overall, background music on an online casino site is not a feature that would see a lot of use.
