Anyone who loves music will know that it connects with us on more than just a physical level. There’s something about it that touches our emotions and can affect our mood, even when the particular song has no lyrics. It’s why so many of us turn to music when we’re happy, or sad, knowing that what we listen to can either enhance or help to dispel that mood. It’s why film soundtracks are so vital to creating precisely the ambience the director requires.
Music and casino have long gone together
The power of music is something that casino owners have known for a long time – and we’re not just talking about how a long Las Vegas residency for Elton John can help to attract gamblers. It’s more the ambient music that even online casinos where you can play live roulette use as a matter of course. For the uninitiated, this is a form of online play where the game is run by an actual dealer and the action is streamed, live, to a player’s PC or mobile device. It’s a method of play that has been specifically developed by online operators to replicate, as closely as possible, the actual casino experience.
While there has been a certain amount of research carried out in the past into the effect of the sort of music that’s piped into bricks and mortar casinos, only a few examinations have been carried out into the online equivalents.
A study reveals more
But, late in 2018, a ground-breaking study into the subject was published. The research, titled “An Exploratory Study of Gamblers’ Perceptions of Music’s Effects on Gambling Behaviour” was carried out in collaboration between the Music and Psychology departments of the University of Sheffield. It involved presenting 136 online gamblers with a questionnaire whose aim was to discover, firstly, what they thought of the music played on online sites and, secondly, to see what difference using their own music made to them.
Nearly 60% of the respondents reported that the websites’ own music help to create an atmosphere for their play, with over 35% saying that the right kind of music could attract them to a particular game or area of the website. 30% also said that they tended to find it a distraction.
When it came to choosing their own music to play, the respondents had some very different things to say about it. The first was that only 14% of the online casino visitors found it a distraction – logical if you consider that it was music that they’d chosen. On the other hand, more people (67%) said that it helped to create the right kind of atmosphere as they played while 37% said it helped them concentrate.
It’s also given a few pointers as to why we should choose our own music while we’re at the online casino. As to which playlist to choose, that’s just going to be a matter of personal choice.
