Music is pretty important to most of us on the team at Cafe Allez! And it’s absolutely vital in creating the right vibe in the ‘shop.

We only realised this fully in our opening week when we hadn’t quite got around to installing a sound system. The atmosphere just wasn’t right, in fact it was downright awkward when the ‘shop wasn’t full of people. We made it a priority to install a potent (but tiny) Bose wireless system.

We then went ahead with a premium Spotify subscription (along with TheMusicLicence so we could legally play it!). This is an absolute bargain and a constant source of wonder to me. I grew up in an age when a CD album would be around £10-£15 and I’d have to save up for a while for it and cycle to the shops to buy it.

Now, at the press of a button, we can conjure up almost any music we can imagine via Spotify. Sometimes it’s a specific album, sometimes we’ll pick a genre of music, sometimes we’ll pick a playlist that has been curated to fit well with a certain mood, time of the day, or day of the week, either by Spotify themselves or from a contributor.

The occasional unexpected outburst of explicit lyrics aside(!), there really is no downside.

We pick the music to play during opening hours quite unscientifically, but we all kind of know what feels right for ourselves and our customers in the moment. Come closing time, we pick the music that helps us clean down the best, and the Cafe Allez! playlist: ‘CleanDown Classics, Volume 1’, is surely to be released soon.

We also experiment quite a bit. I remember picking some classical music early one Monday morning. A sole lady customer was in, drinking her caffe latte and reading a book, and everything just felt right.

Starbucks feels the same way albeit with a slightly bigger budget than ours! We know that they change the music played to suit the time of day, starting with quieter music (often classical) and moving towards more up-tempo tracks as the day progresses. They employ a pair of music curators who’ve been dedicated to this job for 20 years plus and have been credited with making some bands, as they are not averse to playing lesser-known, eclectic tracks in their shops. They’ll also slightly customise their soundtracks to be suitable for a given region.

So, now you know how we select our music – and we’d love to know what you would like to hear when visiting, or what you think would get us through the clean-down that bit faster…