Who is the music for?
The speaker pack was cheerful. Dates, timings, AV specs. And then one line I haven't been able to put down:
"You'll need a theme song to walk out to — we can help with that."
A theme song. Like a boxer. Like a wrestler bursting through smoke and pyrotechnics.
I'm going to be standing on that stage talking about the death of my daughter.
What the hell would I choose?
💡 ONE IDEA WELL
I started the way anyone would. I scrolled through songs I love, auditioning them for a job I couldn't describe.
I kept coming back to Take On Me. But the original is all sprint: that synth riff, the impossible falsetto, a song built to make a room bounce. And I am not there to make the room bounce.
Then there's the unplugged version, recorded three decades later. Same words. Same melody. Slowed down and stripped back until it isn't a pop song any more. It's a man looking back at something. It's gorgeous. And I still wasn't sure it worked.
Two versions of one song I love. Two entirely different rooms.
That's when I noticed the real question hiding underneath the fun one. I had been asking which song. I should have been asking who the music was for. Was it there to get me pumped up? Or to prepare the audience? Was it for the person walking towards the microphone, or for the room deciding what kind of talk this was going to be?
I didn't know.
🧰 LESS MESS, MORE MESSAGE
Restaurants worked this out decades ago, and researchers have been confirming it ever since.* Play slow music and diners linger, order another glass of wine, settle in. Play something uptempo and the forks speed up. Nobody decides to chew in time with the playlist. It just happens. Bodies fall in with the tempo they're given.
Your audience is no different. Whatever is playing as they find their seats, as the lights shift, as you walk towards the microphone, is setting the room's pulse before you say a word. Loud and fast tells them: this is a show. Soft and slow tells them: settle, this one needs space. The room gets tuned either way. The only question is whether anyone chose the tuning.
And you're in the room too. Whatever is in your ears backstage is setting your metronome as much as theirs. Play thrash before a talk about grief, and you might find yourself sprinting through the sentences that most need to walk.
The walk-on song isn't decoration. It's the first slide of the talk.
🚦 TRY THIS
You may never be offered a walk-on song. You still have one.
Before your next talk, ask yourself two questions.
What state do I need to be in when I say my first sentence? And what state do I want the room in when they hear it? Answer those first. The music comes second.
Then build for it. If the answer is calm, the song in your headphones backstage should walk, not sprint. If the answer is energy, fine, reach for the fast one, but do it because you chose it, not because it was already playing.
And this works beyond the stage. A playlist before a night shift. A song before the difficult conversation. You are allowed a ritual. If you ever do get a say in what the room hears before you begin, take it. It's the only slide the audience absorbs without reading.
🧭 ASK YOURSELF THIS
Next time you're preparing a talk, before you touch a single slide:
Who is the music for?
For weeks I couldn't choose.
But I noticed where I was looking. Not in anything with "motivation" or "pre-game" in the title. I kept scrolling through a playlist I built years ago called The Story of My Life.
Which answered the question better than I could. The song was never going to be about tempo, or theme, or what a room full of strangers expects. The talk is about love. Of course that's where I was looking.
Yesterday morning, I walked on stage to Nothing Compares 2 U.
Not my choice, not exactly. The song I'd circled for weeks got tangled in licensing, and there wasn't time to untangle it before the lights went up. So I made a choice.
I don't think I could have chosen better if I'd tried. Whatever I know about tempo and mood and what a room needs, none of it matters next to a song that already knows what it's like to lose the thing you can't replace.
Maybe that's the real answer to the question I started with. You can spend weeks deciding who the music is for. Sometimes the room decides anyway.
📚 For the scientists (you know who you are)
* Milliman ran the original tempo experiments: shoppers moved through a supermarket faster with fast music (Journal of Marketing, 1982), and restaurant diners ate faster, lingered less, and spent less on drinks with uptempo tracks (Journal of Consumer Research, 1986; slow music produced longer stays and notably higher bar bills). The tempo of the room changes the tempo of the people in it
Milliman, R.E. (1982). Using background music to affect the behavior of supermarket shoppers. Journal of Marketing, 46(3), 86–91.
Milliman, R.E. (1986). The influence of background music on the behavior of restaurant patrons. Journal of Consumer Research, 13(2), 286–289.
