Mood Media was built for 5,000-store rollouts. Your venue isn't a rollout.

Mood Media is what Muzak became. It bought Muzak in 2011, then DMX, then PlayNetwork in 2021 and the in-store advertising network Vibenomics in 2023, and it now claims 500,000 locations across 150 countries.¹²¹⁰ It went through a Chapter 11 restructuring in 2020 and has been owned by the private-equity firm Vector Capital since.⁹ None of that is a criticism of the product; it explains how it's sold. Mood's business is 5,000-store rollouts with installation crews, signage, scent and "24/7 remote monitoring". Its UK sales form asks how many locations you have before anyone talks to you.⁵¹⁰

For a venue or a growing chain, that shape has consequences: in Europe there's no price list, no online checkout and no trial. In Sweden, Mood is represented by an independent partner, and Mood's own Swedish site is in English with a 2019 copyright line.¹¹ Tonada is the opposite shape on purpose: the price is on the website, the trial needs no card, a zone is live in minutes, and a two-hundred-location estate runs from one dashboard at the same €19.99 per zone as a single café.

Mood's American pages are unambiguous: Mood Harmony "provides fully licensed commercial music, covering all necessary public performance royalties": "ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, GMR".¹⁴ The coverage applies to Mood-provided services only and excludes live music, DJs, TV and ticketed events.¹⁵ Cross the Atlantic and the language changes. Mood's European licensing page names "SACEM (France), GEMA (Germany), PRS for Music (UK) and SIAE (Italy)" (all authors' societies) and says nothing about the recordings side that venues also pay: PPL in the UK, GVL in Germany, SAMI in Sweden.⁶ Mood's own European blog says "all of the appropriate licensing fees are covered";¹⁶ PPL PRS says a venue using a background-music supplier "may require TheMusicLicence".⁷ Two statements, one venue. Get Mood's in writing.

Tonada doesn't need a paragraph like that. Every track is produced in-house and registered with no society, so there is nothing for PRS, PPL, GEMA, GVL, STIM or SAMI to license. You receive a certificate listing every track and its clearance, and you hand it to any inspector who asks.

Mood's US shop has three tiers, and the cheapest one is instructive. Fundamentals, at $17 a month, is "great background music from independent artists": "Independent Artists, Composers, and Sound Creators", pre-programmed stations only.² Popular artists start at Signature, $35.³ In other words, the largest music-for-business company in the world has concluded that a great many venues don't need chart music, and priced accordingly.

Tonada starts from that conclusion and goes further. Instead of licensing independent tracks from a catalogue that every other Fundamentals subscriber also gets, Tonada's producers write, produce and mix the music themselves, the platform adapts each track's energy to your venue, and with Bespoke a dedicated producer composes a catalogue that belongs only to your brand. "Over 120 million fully licensed tracks and more than 1500 curated playlists"⁵ is a big library. It's also the same library as the shop next door.

Read Mood's online terms before you read its brochure. Plans renew automatically; "No rebate or refund (partial or otherwise)"; prices can change on 30 days' notice; and "A separate Mood Music subscription is needed for each business location or to play unique music in different areas of the same location."⁴² There is no free trial in the shop.¹ The complaints Mood answers publicly on the Better Business Bureau site are about the same two things: auto-renewal charges and cancellation.¹³ Enterprise agreements are quoted individually, and their terms aren't published; you'll learn them from the contract.

Tonada's terms fit in a sentence: €19.99 per zone per month, a 30-day trial with no card, and "Nothing is charged automatically." A zone is one area with its own music (dining room, terrace and bar are three) and that is the only thing you count.

Mood Harmony schedules music by daypart: breakfast programme, lunch programme, evening programme, set in advance.² Tonada links live signals (weather feeds, foot-traffic sensors, occupancy data, time of day, season) and shifts energy, tempo and mood to what is actually happening in the space. A rainy Tuesday afternoon and a full Saturday sound different without anyone touching the dashboard, staff can rate tracks from the app while they play, and every location and zone runs from one screen in its own time zone.