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Music, signage and atmosphere influence how long customers stay, how they feel, and how they perceive a brand.
In experiential leisure venues, these elements help create anticipation on arrival, influence guest energy throughout their visit and improve the overall experience and time spent in-venue.
Hollywood Bowl has built a strong position as a leading UK entertainment brand, with over 60 venues nationwide. The offer is clear and compelling: bowling, arcades, food and drink in a social, family-friendly environment.
We were genuinely impressed by the venue - it delivers a high-energy, engaging experience that works well for families, groups and events. The following observations are intended to help refine and elevate that experience further, with a focus on consistency and atmosphere across sites.
The venue operates in a naturally high-noise environment, driven by bowling lanes, arcade machines, pool tables and regular staff announcements (e.g. birthdays and group celebrations). This creates a lively and social atmosphere, but also means music currently sits in the background rather than leading the experience.
The playlist leans broadly towards mainstream pop, with familiar tracks appearing intermittently. However, there is limited sense of a defined musical identity or structured flow, which can make the soundtrack feel more incidental than intentional.
Digital signage is widely used throughout the venue, particularly around the games area and behind key service points. Screens display a mix of menus, ordering instructions, branded content, promotions and live sports.
While this creates a dynamic and content-rich environment, the variety of screen types, sizes and messages can feel visually fragmented, with multiple pieces of content competing for attention at once.
Introduce a clear, recognisable music direction aligned with the brand’s social and high-energy positioning. Moving towards a curated indie/pop or feel-good alternative style would create a more distinctive and modern atmosphere.
Rather than competing with operational noise, music should complement it. This means selecting tracks with strong rhythm, familiarity and clarity that work within a busy, activity-led space.
Reducing unnecessary content rotation, aligning messaging formats, and ensuring more consistent pacing across screens will create a calmer, more cohesive visual experience. This helps guests engage more easily with key information without removing the energy of the space.
Based on your brand, audience and environment, here’s an example of how your music could feel with Startle.
This playlist leans into a modern indie/pop space - featuring artists such as ROLE MODEL, Ruel, Remi Wolf and Sam Fender - blending recognisable, feel-good tracks with more distinctive selections.
The intention is to:
Choose from our library of over 100 playlists spanning genres, moods and sectors, or opt for fully curated soundtracks tailored to your venues.
We offer simple, scalable digital signage to promote promotions and brand messaging, helping create a more connected and commercially effective guest journey.
With Startle Studio, you’ll have full visibility and control of all venue music and signage from one central platform, ensuring consistency across every location.
We’ve worked with multi-site experiential leisure brands to create more engaging, social and atmosphere-led environments across their estate.
We partnered with Sixes Social Cricket to help shape a more energetic and immersive guest experience across multiple venues. By aligning music and digital signage with the pace and personality of the experience, they were able to create a stronger sense of atmosphere in their venues.
This approach included:
I’ve been really impressed with Startle since introducing it at Sixes. The setup process was smooth and efficient, and the team made everything easy from the start. The music creates a consistently upbeat and welcome vibe in our venues, and their support has been excellent – responsive, reliable, and a pleasure to work with!
Area Manager
Book your discovery call to explore how music and signage could enhance experience, consistency and engagement across your estate.
On this call we’ll:
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