Picture yourself walking into a bakery that has soft piano music playing overhead. You glance at a special breakfast plate, complete with a pastry and fresh fruit, and a price pops into your head that feels reasonable. Would that number have been different if pop music had been playing instead? And would the genre have mattered at all if you were just buying a plain coffee and roll?
A study published in Marketing Letters set out to untangle exactly this kind of question. Earlier work had shown that classical background music tends to encourage people to spend more on food and drinks than pop music does. What remained unclear was why. The researchers wanted to know whether the music was quietly reshaping the prices consumers consider acceptable in the first place.
The questions behind the music
Ori Grossman and Matti Rachamim of the Graduate School of Business Administration at Bar-Ilan University in Israel built their investigation around an idea from behavioral pricing research. According to that work, every shopper carries around a range of prices they find acceptable for a given item. At the bottom is a minimum price, below which the product starts to seem suspiciously cheap or low quality. At the top is a maximum price, the most someone would be willing to hand over. Somewhere in between sits the reference price, an internal benchmark that people use to judge whether an asking price feels fair.
The authors wanted to learn whether music style nudges any of these numbers. Their working idea was that classical music might widen the acceptable range by pushing up the ceiling, while leaving the floor more or less where it was. If so, that would help explain why people spend more when classical music is playing.
They also drew on a concept called the musical congruity hypothesis, which holds that music activates certain associations in a listener’s mind and makes them more receptive to products that match the music’s connotations. Classical music tends to carry upscale, refined associations, so it might fit certain products better than others.
Splitting products into needs and treats
One distinction sits at the center of the study: the difference between utilitarian and hedonic products. Utilitarian products serve a practical, functional purpose, the kinds of things you buy to get a job done. Hedonic products are more about pleasure and indulgence, tied to enjoyment and lifestyle. A plain breakfast roll leans utilitarian. The same roll bundled with cookies, a pastry, and fresh fruit leans hedonic.
The researchers reasoned that because hedonic choices tend to be driven by emotion, and because music works on emotion, music style might sway pricing judgments for treats more than for everyday necessities. For functional purchases, people tend to think more analytically, comparing prices against what they usually pay, so the soundtrack might barely register.
How the study worked
The team recruited 134 participants through the online research platform Prolific, all of them residents of London, England. The sample was roughly split between men and women, with an average age of about 38. Each person was randomly placed into one of four groups, formed by crossing two music styles (classical or pop) with two product types (hedonic or utilitarian).
To isolate the effect of style rather than melody, the researchers chose two pieces built on the same musical material. The classical version was the third movement of Muzio Clementi’s Sonatina for Piano, performed by pianist Yuja Wang at 87 beats per minute. The pop version was Phil Collins’s “A Groovy Kind of Love,” which shares the same underlying motif, at 90 beats per minute. Three judges with musical backgrounds confirmed that the two pieces were similar in their motifs but different in style. Both clips ran about two minutes.
While the music played, participants read a scenario in which the British bakery chain Greggs had launched a new breakfast. Everyone got a breakfast roll with a choice of filling and a hot drink. Those in the hedonic groups were told the breakfast also came with cookies, pastry, and fresh fruit for dessert. Participants then reported the minimum and maximum they would pay, along with how much pleasure and arousal they felt, their sense of how much they knew about the price, their perception of product quality, their involvement, how easy the task felt, and their general interest in music.
What the numbers showed
The minimum price held steady across the board. Whether classical or pop music played, and whether the product was a treat or a necessity, the floor of the acceptable range did not budge in any statistically meaningful way. This matched the researchers’ expectation that music style would leave the bottom limit alone.
The maximum price told a more layered story. On its own, music style did not significantly move the ceiling. But the effect depended on what was being bought. For the utilitarian breakfast, classical and pop music produced essentially the same maximum. For the hedonic breakfast, participants set a higher ceiling when classical music played than when pop music played. The reference price followed the same pattern, coming out higher for the hedonic product specifically in the classical condition.
The acceptable price range, the gap between floor and ceiling, was wider when classical music played than when pop music played. Because the floor stayed put while the ceiling rose for treats, the range stretched upward.
Pleasure turned out to be part of the picture. Participants who heard classical music while considering the hedonic breakfast reported the highest pleasure levels. A further analysis indicated that music style raised the maximum price for the hedonic product especially when a person’s pleasure level was high. In short, the combination of an indulgent product, classical music, and an elevated sense of enjoyment was linked to the highest prices people were willing to accept.
Ruling out other explanations
The study also tested a list of other factors that might have accounted for the results, and found that they did not. Arousal level, perception of product quality, knowledge about the price, involvement, sense of task ease, and interest in music showed no meaningful effect on the link between music style and pricing. The authors interpret these results as support for the musical congruity hypothesis, with pleasure and product type carrying the effect rather than the other candidates.
What it might mean for sellers
For businesses, the findings point to a low-cost lever. The authors suggest that marketers of indulgent food and drink may benefit from choosing classical music that fits the character of the product, whether in advertising or in physical spaces like stores, bars, and restaurants. For everyday functional items, the genre playing overhead appears far less likely to shift what customers will pay.
A few caveats deserve attention. The study was run online rather than in an actual cafe or shop, and the authors note that field settings could behave differently. Participants judged a bundle of items, such as a full breakfast, rather than a single product, and the researchers point out that people tend to have clearer price expectations for single items, which may be more resistant to musical influence. The work also looked only at classical versus pop, leaving genres like jazz, rock, and folk for future study. And the scenario relied on one specific chain, Greggs, which not every participant may know or like. With those limits in mind, the study offers evidence that the right soundtrack can quietly widen the price a shopper is willing to pay, but mainly for a treat, and mainly when the music brings a sense of pleasure.
