Music and Waiting Time: How Music Affects Perceived Durations

The common claim is that music makes waits feel shorter. The research is more interesting: music often does not shrink perceived time, but it changes how people feel about the wait and how long they are willing to stay. Here is what three studies found, their limits, and what to do with it.

Every business makes people wait: in line at the counter, for a table, in a clinic waiting room, on hold. The standard advice is to add music because it makes the wait feel shorter. That advice is half right. The research on music and waiting time shows something more useful: music often does not shrink the perceived length of a wait, and sometimes stretches it, yet people still feel better about the wait and are willing to stay longer.

This article walks through three peer-reviewed studies, one on a bank queue, one on people left waiting in a room, and one on telephone holds, then turns them into practical steps. Like all research of this kind, the studies are small and specific, so we note their limits as we go.

Music and waiting time: two competing ideas

Researchers have long debated two explanations of how music affects perceived waiting time.

• The attention explanation. Waiting feels long when we watch the clock. Anything that distracts attention from the passage of time, including music, should make the wait feel shorter. The operations writer David Maister put the everyday version neatly: unoccupied time feels longer than occupied time.
• The information explanation. Our sense of how long something took depends partly on how much we experienced during it. Music we enjoy gives our minds more to process, so the period can seem longer in hindsight. Research by James Kellaris and Robert Kent in the early 1990s found that people exposed to more pleasant music judged the same period as longer.

Both effects are real, which is why simple claims in either direction fall apart. The more practical question is not "does the wait feel shorter?" but "does the customer end up happier, and do they stay?"

Study 1: a bank queue, with and without music

Michael Hui, Laurette Dubé and Jean-Charles Chebat published a well-known experiment in the Journal of Retailing in 1997 (Hui, Dubé and Chebat, 1997). They recruited 116 undergraduate business students at a Canadian university and showed them a video filmed in a real bank branch. Each participant was asked to imagine standing at the front of the line, waiting to be served. The wait lasted exactly four minutes. Groups heard one of four music extracts, two rated pleasant and two less pleasant, or no music at all.

The findings are worth reading slowly:

• Pleasant music made the wait seem longer, not shorter. Participants who heard positively rated music reported a longer perceived wait than those with less pleasant music or no music.
• But any music improved how people rated the environment. Regardless of whether the music was rated pleasant, the bank felt better with it than without it.
• Pleasant music improved the emotional response to the wait itself, and led to stronger intentions to approach and deal with the bank.
• The longer perceived wait did not significantly hurt those intentions.

In other words, music did not win by fooling the clock. It won by making the environment and the experience feel better. The limits are worth keeping in mind: a video rather than a real queue, students rather than typical bank customers, and a single four-minute wait. The authors themselves call their conclusions tentative for that last reason, since music might act differently on longer waits.

Study 2: how long people will actually wait

Adrian North and David Hargreaves took a different approach in a study published in Environment and Behavior in 1999 (North and Hargreaves, 1999). One hundred psychology undergraduates volunteered for what they were told was a short experiment. Each was left alone in a lab to wait for it to start, with either no music or instrumental new age and ambient music at low, moderate or high complexity. The experimenter returned after 20 minutes.

• In silence, people gave up sooner. Twelve of the 25 participants in the no-music condition left before 20 minutes had passed, compared with four, three and four in the three music conditions.
• Average waiting time was shorter in silence: about 15.3 minutes, compared with roughly 18.5 to 19.3 minutes with music.
• The complexity of the music made no difference between the three music conditions.

The authors suggest that music may distract attention from an internal timing mechanism. For a business, the headline is simple: silence is the worst option for a waiting area, and you do not need unusual or complex music to get the benefit. As always, the participants were students in a lab, and the waiting was for an experiment rather than a meal or a doctor.

Study 3: on hold on the telephone

Nicolas Guéguen and Céline Jacob studied the situation most businesses think of first: holding on the phone. In a short paper published in Psychology of Music in 2002 (Guéguen and Jacob, 2002), participants waited on the telephone with an on-hold message either accompanied by music or not.

According to the abstract, compared with the no-music condition, music led people to underestimate the time they had spent waiting and to overestimate how long they would wait before hanging up. That is the opposite direction from the bank study on perceived duration, which is a useful reminder that context matters: a caller on hold can do nothing but listen, while a person in a queue can look around, watch the teller and talk. For on-hold music research generally, the finding supports the practice of using music rather than silence or a bare message.

What the three studies agree on

Put side by side, the studies do not prove that music makes waiting feel shorter. They support three narrower conclusions:

1. Silence is the worst choice. In both the lab and phone settings, people waited longer with music, and the bank study found every music condition improved how the environment felt.
2. Pleasantness matters for feelings, not necessarily for the clock. Music people like may make time seem slightly longer, but it makes the wait feel better and the business more appealing.
3. Context changes the effect. Queues, lab rooms and phone holds are different experiences. Test in your own setting rather than assuming a result transfers.

These are small, older studies with mostly student participants. Treat them as a sound basis for good defaults, not as a promise of a specific number of extra minutes.

Practical steps for music in waiting areas

Music in waiting areas works best as part of a larger plan to make waits tolerable. The research on music fits alongside common operations advice: explain the wait, keep people comfortable and give them something to do.

• Never leave a waiting area silent. Even modest background music is better than nothing.
• Choose pleasant, calm, low-familiarity music. The bank study used music selected for low familiarity. Familiar hits invite singing along, commentary and strong reactions, good or bad.
• Keep it mostly instrumental in clinics and offices, where people are reading forms, talking to reception or feeling anxious.
• Keep volume below conversation. Receptionists need to call names and people need to hear them. Our guide on how loud background music should be explains how to set it.
• Avoid short loops. If the same track comes around twice during a wait, people start measuring time by it. For long waits, use long rotations.
• Tell people how long the wait is. Music improves how a wait feels; information reduces uncertainty. Use both.
• Watch the transitions. Abrupt stops, ads between tracks or dead air make people notice time again.

Queue music by setting

• Counter lines and takeaway queues: a moderate, steady groove keeps a line feeling alive. Avoid slow, sleepy music during peak periods, when you want the line moving.
• Restaurant waits for tables: warm, pleasant music at the host stand and bar keeps waiting guests comfortable. Our restaurants page shows how that fits a dining room's day.
• Clinics and service desks: calm, mostly instrumental music with no sudden changes. Jazzy, relaxed material such as our chill collection suits reception areas where people sit for a while.
• Phone holds: use music rather than silence, keep messages short and honest, and check that the music is licensed for telephone use, which is a separate question from in-store playback.

Our overview of how music affects sales covers the related research on tempo, style and volume in stores and restaurants.

Whatever you play in a public waiting area, it must be licensed for business use; personal streaming accounts are not. WeavyAudio provides an original catalog licensed for background playback at your registered location, with calm, instrumental-leaning collections suited to waiting areas. You can see the plans.

FAQ

Does music make waiting feel shorter?

Not reliably. In a bank queue experiment, pleasant music made a four-minute wait seem longer, yet people felt better about the wait and the bank. In a phone study, music made callers underestimate time spent waiting. The consistent finding is that music makes waits more tolerable.

Is silence better than music in a waiting room?

The evidence points the other way. In one lab study, people waiting in silence gave up sooner and waited about three to four minutes less on average than people waiting with music.

What kind of music is best for waiting areas?

Pleasant, calm, mostly instrumental music that is not too familiar, played below conversation level, with a long rotation so tracks do not repeat during a typical wait.

Does on-hold music keep callers on the line?

A 2002 study found that callers who heard music while on hold underestimated how long they had waited and overestimated how long they would wait before hanging up, compared with callers who heard no music.

Are these studies reliable?

They are peer-reviewed but small, often with student participants, and each covers one setting. They support sensible defaults, not guaranteed results. Test changes in your own business.