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If you have spent time in a chain coffee shop recently, you might have noticed something off. Especially if, instead of rushing out after securing a caffeine-fix, you decide to sit down with a laptop and linger.
While the ambience of a central-London Pret A Manger has never exactly been studious, it is usually possible to mentally tune out some of the chatter and background music as a kind of ‘white noise’ and get some light work and emailing done.
At least that is what I once found to be the case. However, a new musical phenomenon is menacing coffee-shop workers and laptop-lingerers alike.
It announces itself in the form of repeated choruses, stunted phrasing and hazy-sounding vocals.
‘Shazam’ one of these songs and you will be taken the Spotify profile of an artist with barely 100 monthly listeners, no bio and if you’re lucky an uncanny-looking AI-generated profile photo.
In fact, after Shazam-ing every song for an hour in Pret and checking whether the artist appeared to be real or an AI, I found the following breakdown:
So how did it come to pass that out of every 22 songs played in a given Pret, 21 are AI-slop? To understand this, you have to understand the background music industry.
The background of ‘background’
It’s the early 2000s and posh-boy art graduates Ben Bridgewater and Dan Lywood have found their place in the London’s DJ scene.
While artists like Fatboy Slim and The Chemical Brothers own the night, having burrowed their way out of Britain’s rave scene, Bridgewater and Lywood own the chattier parts of the evening.
London’s bars, private members clubs and fashion after-parties want to revel in the music that 00s DJ-ing has to offer, but hiring a DJ with too much ego can kill the conversation and drive everyone home.
Lywood and Bridgewater have their own offering to venues. As Lywood puts it: “I think your place is cool, I understand lots of cool music and I know who your target audience are, and I can put together some music they’re really gonna like.”
The pair were players in the nascent but growing ‘background music’ industry, which offered ego-less ambience designed to complement rather than dominate swanky events.
Venues loved it – but when the DJs left, they were still disappointed to have to return to their regular music programming of pop radio.
Bridgewater and Lywood spotted a solution and an opportunity. The development of MP3 players like the iPod allowed hours of music to be compiled and shared far more easily than via CDs or vinyl.
They could sell a subscription-based service that provided venues with bespoke, monthly refreshed playlists.
In 2006 they started Playlister, part of a wave of DJ-founded background music start-ups who realised that it paid to sell subscriptions.
Background goes corporate
As current Playlister CEO Pete Bowker puts it: “If there’s a Venn diagram that has musos [music nerds] on one side and tech people on the other side – there’s quite a big overlap in between where music nerds and tech nerds rub shoulders.”
That is to say, it wasn’t long before technology became a core part of background music’s offering.
Reloading a venue’s iPod every month was a slow and logistically challenging task when spread across a lot of venues.
Bowker says: “A lot of the marketplace started spending a lot of time writing code and developing and becoming tech companies essentially.”
Firms soon developed ‘music boxes’ that could be permanently installed in venues and refreshed at first by swapping out an SD-card, and eventually remotely over the internet. This allowed them to cut costs and for background music boxes to filter down into cafés and high-street shops.
Background music improved across the hospitality world.
As technology became a bigger component in the business and it became easier to grow revenue by simply installing more music boxes, the market began to change.
“Bigger companies were getting into our world,” says Bowker. ” They were buying up smaller companies and wanted a competitive advantage, knowing that the more subscriptions they sold on a monthly basis, the higher the value of their businesses would be.”
Key to understanding the background music industry is understanding ‘zones’. Background music companies sell monthly music subscriptions on a ‘per zone’ basis, with one zone being a room or lobby.
A smaller business, like a restaurant, might only consist of one zone, and therefore one subscription.
A larger business, like a hotel or beach club, might consist of three zones, such as a reception area, restaurant and billiards room, and therefore three subscriptions.
As businesses started ‘zone-chasing’ to boost their revenues, they found themselves competing in an already-saturated market and started having to compete on price, pushing down the average price per zone.
At this point the market started to split.
Bowker says: “The industry was starting to fill up with tech companies for whom the sausage they were squeezing through their pipe just happened to be music, but their commercial setup was one of a software-as-a-service model.”
Some firms, like Playlister, decided this wasn’t for them, and instead specialised in quality music by courting upmarket clients who would pay more for a bespoke service. Today, Playlister’s 12 employees provide background music for just 700 zones, providing them with nearly an hour per week to review and update each zone’s playlist
At the other end of the market, it was a race to the bottom.
Imagesound is one of the industry’s larger players who still claim to provide a bespoke service, with their website stating: “Remember that friend at school who had an encyclopaedic music knowledge? Well, we hired a bunch of them, all around the world. No algorithms here!”
Imagesound covers 65,000 zones globally and has 145 employees. That leaves Imagesound with just five employee minutes per week to monitor and update a given zone’s playlist, meaning their curation is spread thin.
Outside of the small circle of firms that still market themselves as having human tastemakers, it is even more of a Wild West.
Which is where the story continues in an overstimulating Zone 1 Pret A Manger.
Pret ‘AI’ Manger
Towards the end of 2025 Pret posted a £525mn loss, citing that cost of living pressures meant customers were shopping elsewhere in a search for cheaper lunch and coffee deals.
Price shocks, a National Insurance hike and high rents have left hospitality firms across Britain on unstable financial footing and looking for savings wherever possible.
Amid these pressures, Pret’s decision to play AI-generated music could be a sign that the era of quality music curation for all is over, with only higher-end brands able to justify a cushy bespoke subscription.
According to Bowker, who has experience directly negotiating with corporate clients, the decision to find secure a cheaper music license will will have been an unsentimental one.
“The music in these kinds of places is being bought by the same people who are buying toilet roll. They’re probably focussing more on the relative concentrated level of bleach in their bleach than they are on the music.”
Pret A Manger could not be reached for comment.
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Interviewees:
– Pete Bowker — 25/03/2026, Zoom interview
– Dan Lywood — 26/03/2026, LinkedIn chat