Why Your Gym’s Playlist Is Sabotaging Your Members’ Workout Experience

From workout energy to brand identity, the music playing throughout a gym can have a bigger impact on the member experience than operators realize

Your final quarter mile on the bike or last set during a HIIT circuit is often the hardest to get through. You already went into your workout exhausted after a long day at the office. You’re dripping with sweat. That hitch you’ve felt in your knee all day is really starting to throb.

Then, that song starts pumping through the speakers. It’s the kind that hits you like a bolt of energy. You recognize it by its first few notes, and once the beat picks up, your body does too. You find another gear, and before you know it, you’re done.

That’s what the right music can do. In most big box gyms, though, nobody is thinking about it.

Walk into one at 6 p.m. and listen. There’s a good chance you’ll hear a radio DJ talking over the end of a song, an ad for a weekend mattress sale and a track you heard twice yesterday. Or it’s a staff member’s personal playlist, picked for the front desk rather than the squat rack.

Big box operators obsess over equipment, layout, lighting and cleanliness. They spend heavily on branding and signage. Then they hand the one element that fills every square foot of the building to a radio station or a consumer streaming account and move on.

Why Tunes Need Attention

Your gym’s music isn’t a lobby TV. It reaches every member and follows them for the entirety of their stay.

“When people choose a gym, a lot of that decision comes down to how the place feels when they walk in,” said Rusty Greene, CEO and founder of the fitness-first audio platform FITRADIO. “Music is one of the only things in the building that touches every member at the same time, whether they’re on a treadmill, in the weight room or walking to the locker room. It sets the intention and the vibe of the whole space before anyone even starts training.”

Operators often excuse generic playlists or ad-riddled radio by telling themselves most members wear headphones anyway. That reasoning is outdated.

“People have gotten a lot more intentional about the social side of the gym,” Greene said. “Coming out of the pandemic, the gym turned into a third place again, somewhere you go to be around people, and wearing big headphones shuts that off. You also have more people doing strength work and functional training, where you’re moving between stations, talking to a training partner or maybe filming a set.”

Then there are the members who never had headphones in to begin with.

“Clients in a PT session usually aren’t wearing headphones, so they’re hearing everything, and those are often some of your highest value members,” Greene added.

Those are the members a gym can least afford to lose, and they’re the ones hearing the mattress ad.

“You walk in, the energy’s right, you feel it and you want to be there,” Greene said. “That feeling carries into the workout.”

The Cost of “Good Enough”

Audio on autopilot doesn’t only flatten the experience. It can cost the business.

Commercial radio means someone else controls what plays in your building, including ads, sometimes for a competitor down the street. Repetitive loops wear on members and staff who are there every day. There’s also a risk many operators don’t know they’re carrying: personal streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music are licensed for personal use, not public performance in a business.

“A lot of operators don’t realize that playing a personal streaming account on the gym floor isn’t licensed for commercial use,” Greene said. “The PROs do enforce it, and it’s an easy exposure to avoid.”

How to Set That Vibe

Building an engaging in-gym audio experience means treating your main floor the way you would a dedicated group fitness space. Those rooms often have their own instructors and music to instill tempo and energy. The gym floor deserves the same attention, applied differently because of everything happening on it at once.

“You can’t match every person’s workout, so it comes down to picking the right energy for the right time of day,” Greene said. “Your 5 a.m. crowd isn’t the same as your lunch crowd or your after-work rush. A good music partner should understand your member demographics and curate around those day parts, so the music shifts as the room shifts. Over time that builds a real sonic identity for the gym, where members walk in and it sounds like your brand.”

If the music isn’t landing, the signs are easy to spot.

“Ask your trainers what their clients say,” Greene said. “Are people complimenting the music or asking what song is playing? Beyond that, look at how many people on the floor have headphones in, and whether instructors are bringing their own speakers.”

“Longer term, it ties into retention,” he went on. “Nobody cancels over one bad song, but music is part of every minute of every visit, and when it feels premium, the whole club feels more premium.”

What It Looks Like in Practice

Club Studio, a boutique fitness concept under LA Fitness’ parent brand Fitness International, is a case study in doing it deliberately. The brand uses FITRADIO across its entire 20+ studio operation.

At Club Studio, FITRADIO programs different music for different zones in each club, so every space fits the workouts happening in it. Those zone designations are also consistent from club to club, so the brand sounds the same everywhere.

“That’s the lesson for other operators,” Greene said. “Club Studio didn’t think of music as one decision. They thought about the member walking through the building and what each space should feel like. And the programming is handled for them, so their team can focus on running great clubs.”

Resolution & Results

Gym operators already wear too many hats. They shouldn’t have to be a DJ too.

FITRADIO is happy to spin the discs. The fitness-first audio platform curates and designs custom mixes for partner brands, with more than 40,000 DJ-made mixes and playlists updated daily, all licensed for commercial use.

Beyond Club Studio, FITRADIO powers Orangetheory Fitness, LA Fitness, Burn Boot Camp, F45 Training and D1 Training, and it recently partnered with leading fitness competition brand HYROX.

Every gym already has a sound. The question is whether anyone chose it.