Walk into a store, a showroom, or a reception area with no sound at all, and you notice within seconds. You hear the fridges, the till, the door, a conversation across the room that you were never meant to hear. Nobody lingers in a room like that. People move fast, staff talk quietly, and the screen on the wall plays a good video that nobody stops for.
Atmosphere is measurable. Mood Media had Censuswide survey 12,261 people across seven countries, including the Netherlands, about the retail and hospitality spaces they had visited that year. 79% said a pleasant atmosphere would make them stay longer, and in the same study, engaging content on digital signage screens made 26% of them more likely to buy something. Sound and screens were measured separately and came back doing the same job.
Most businesses already know this, which is why so many of them solve it badly. A phone on a shelf behind the counter. A laptop with a browser tab open, plugged into a speaker, that somebody has to restart every morning. A radio in a back office turned up loud enough to reach the shop floor. And if there are digital signage screens in the space at all, they run in silence, which leaves audio and visuals as two unrelated jobs handled by two different people.
What music adds to a digital signage screen
A digital signage screen sets the visual tone of a space: the offer, the wayfinding, the product video, the welcome message. Music sets the emotional tone. When they are managed separately, they drift apart. The screen runs a calm brand film while a talk radio station argues in the background. Or the audio dies on Tuesday afternoon, and nobody notices until Friday.
There is also a practical reason. Many digital signage videos are made without meaningful sound, or they play in places where a talking video would be intrusive: a reception area, a showroom, a waiting room, a pharmacy queue. Muting those videos is the right call, but it leaves the room dry. A quiet, continuous audio bed underneath the playlist fills that gap without competing with anything on screen.
Running both from one digital signage platform gives you something simpler: one login, one screen configuration, one place to change the volume, and no extra device to maintain. That matters most for companies with more than a handful of locations, where every physical workaround multiplies by the number of sites.
One note before you set anything up. Playing music in a commercial space usually requires the right public performance license from the local collecting societies, and a personal streaming subscription does not cover it. Licensed business music providers and licensed radio streams exist for exactly this reason, and it is worth a short conversation with whoever handles compliance in your organization before you go live across a country.
The new background audio option in Castit
Castit now lets you attach audio to a screen directly in the CMS, so the sound and the visuals live in the same setup.
You will find it under Screens. Open the screen you want, go to the third tab, Settings & info, and look just below Media volume. The section is called Background audio.
It does two things: it loops an MP3 file, or it plays a live audio stream, underneath everything that screen plays.
A few behaviors are worth knowing before you switch it on, because they are deliberate:
- Videos play muted while a background track is set, so you never get two audio sources fighting each other.
- The track pauses while the screen is asleep, so you are not playing music to an empty, powered-down room.
- It also pauses while an interactive app is open, so a visitor using a touch screen is not interrupted.
- It pauses while the second screen is showing.
Right of the section you will see the current state. Until you add something, it reads No background audio, with two buttons below it: Upload MP3 and Add stream.
Option 1: upload an MP3
Click Upload MP3, choose a file from your device, and that is it. The file loops under the screen's content.
This is the better option for anything you control and want to stay identical everywhere: a branded audio bed, a short loop made for a showroom, an ambient track chosen for a waiting area. No internet dependency for the audio, no station changing its format on you.
Option 2: add a live audio stream
Click Add stream and a small panel opens with a field for a URL.
What goes in that field is a direct link to a live audio stream in MP3, AAC or HLS audio. It is not the station's website. A real stream link normally ends in .mp3, .aac, .m3u8 or .pls.
The panel has Check, Add stream, and Cancel. Paste the link and click Check first. When the link is verified, you get a green confirmation, and then Add stream commits it. If it does not verify, the link is almost always a web page rather than a stream.
Once the stream is added, the section changes: the link appears where No background audio used to be, and two icons show up next to it, play and delete. Play lets you confirm you picked the right station. Delete removes it.
How to find the stream URL for an online radio station
Station websites rarely publish the raw stream link, but your browser can show it to you in under a minute:
- Open the radio station's player page in your browser.
- Open the browser developer tools with Ctrl + Shift + I on Windows or Cmd + Option + I on Mac. F12 also works in most browsers, and so does right-clicking the page and choosing Inspect.
- Open the Network tab.
- Press play on the station's player.
- Watch the list. The audio request appears there, and that is the link you copy into Castit.
Paste it into the stream field, run Check, and add it.
Setting the volume
Media volume, directly above the background audio section, controls the level for that screen. Set it once per screen and leave it. A reception desk and a workshop floor rarely want the same number, and because it is per screen, you are not forced into a compromise across your whole network.
What your business gets from it
Atmosphere you control, not atmosphere you inherit. A room either has a mood or it has whatever noise happens to be in it. Music is the fastest way to set that mood, and it is the one part of a space you can change today without touching the lighting, the layout, or the furniture. A showroom feels considered. A waiting room feels calm. A store feels open rather than empty. Same space, same screens, different experience.
A brand that sounds like itself everywhere. Your screens already carry the logo, the colors, and the tone of voice. Sound is the part most organizations leave to chance. Set the track or the station per screen and every location sounds the way the brand is supposed to sound, instead of whatever the staff on shift felt like that day. Across fifteen branches, that is the difference between a standard and a suggestion.
People stay longer and see more. Background sound keeps customers browsing instead of hurrying, gives some privacy to conversations at a reception desk or service counter, and makes waiting feel shorter. More time in the room means more of your playlist actually gets watched, which is the reason the screens are there in the first place.
A quieter kind of professionalism. Silence makes every other sound louder: the fridge, the till, the door, the conversation two desks away. An audio bed underneath the room absorbs all of it. Visitors register the space as finished and staff stop working in a room where every noise carries.
One system instead of two. No laptop behind the counter, no phone plugged into a speaker, no browser tab someone restarts each morning. The audio starts when the digital signage player starts. Videos mute themselves while a track is set, so nothing needs re-editing and no audio competes with audio.
Changes made by the people who own the content. Audio and volume are set per screen in the same CMS your playlists live in, so marketing or communications adjusts them directly. No site visit, no ticket to IT, no call to whoever installed the speakers.
Turn the sound on
The screens are already in place. The content is already running. The only thing missing is what the room sounds like while people watch it, and that is now a setting rather than a project: open the screen, scroll to background audio, add a track or a stream.
If you want to talk it through first, whether that is which stream to use, how it behaves on your hardware, or what makes sense for the kind of space you run, contact us. We will go through it with you.