It usually starts with a good intention. A regular asks for a track. A bartender remembers a song that always lifts the room at 11pm. The GM hears something in another venue and wants it in the mix by Friday. And because there's no clean way to make that happen, someone pulls out a phone, unplugs the system, and plays it from a consumer app — with an ad break landing somewhere in the middle of your dinner service.
CherryPick exists to end that moment. It's the SpinLoud feature that lets you and your team hand-pick individual tracks into a live channel, while the programming keeps doing its job: right energy, right hour, right transitions, fully licensed.
What CherryPick actually does
CherryPick is a request-and-placement layer that sits on top of your programmed channel. You search, you pick a track, and it enters the rotation — not immediately and crudely, but at a point the system judges musically sensible: matching tempo, energy and texture with what's already playing, and handed off through SpnMix so the transition sounds intentional rather than interrupted.
The difference is subtle in writing and obvious in the room. A dropped-in track that ignores the arc of the evening makes people look up at the speakers. A well-placed one just feels like the channel had good taste.
The three things it solves
First, it removes the phone. Nobody needs to hijack the sound system for one song. Second, it keeps you licensed — CherryPick draws from the same catalogue as the rest of your SpinLoud channel, so a guest request never becomes a compliance problem. Third, it gives your team a legitimate outlet for their instincts about the room, which is something most venue music setups quietly suppress.
The people standing in your room all night know things about it that no algorithm does. CherryPick gives them a way to act on that without dismantling the programming.
Why a playlist can't do this
On a consumer app, "adding a song" means appending it to a list. The list has no sense of time of day, no sense of what came before, and no sense of your brand. Add ten staff favourites over a month and you've created a slow drift — the channel stops sounding like your venue and starts sounding like a compromise between six people's tastes.
CherryPick treats a picked track as an input to programming, not an override of it. Your Brand Sound definition still governs the channel: the genres, eras, energy curve and hard exclusions you and your programmer agreed on. A pick is placed inside those boundaries, not on top of them.
That's also why picks don't stack up into chaos on a busy night. If twelve tracks come in during a two-hour window, they're spaced and sequenced rather than queued back-to-back, so the room still has a shape.
Where CherryPick earns its keep
A few patterns we see repeatedly across venue types:
- Guest requests at the bar — the birthday table, the regular who's in every Thursday, the wedding party that wandered in. One track, handled gracefully, buys a lot of goodwill.
- Staff moments — the closing-time song, the track that always gets the kitchen through a heavy service.
- Brand and campaign tie-ins — an artist you're partnering with, a track from a seasonal campaign, something tied to a local event.
- Retail floor moves — a pick that lifts energy during a quiet mid-afternoon stretch without switching the whole channel.
- Hotel zones with different tempers — lobby, pool, restaurant; each can take its own picks without touching the others.
Early feedback from venues testing CherryPick points to [X% of picks coming from floor staff rather than management] — worth watching in your own reporting once you've run it for a month.
Control, for chains and multi-location operators
If you run more than one site, the first sensible question is: who gets to pick?
CherryPick permissions are set per location and per role from the SpinLoud dashboard. You might give venue managers full picking rights, limit bar staff to a capped number of picks per shift, or switch picking off entirely during defined dayparts — brunch stays brunch, no matter how persuasive the guest at table nine.
Head office keeps visibility. You can see what's being picked, where, and when. That turns a small feature into something genuinely useful for programming decisions: if the same three tracks are picked in five cities, that's a signal your Brand Sound brief might want updating. If one site's picks are consistently pulling against the brand, that's a conversation, not a mystery.
Song requests, handled properly
CherryPick also underpins guest-facing song requests where you want them. Requests arrive as candidates, filtered against your channel rules, and staff approve or ignore them. Nothing reaches the speakers that wouldn't have passed your programming standards anyway — which is the whole point. Guests get to feel heard; you don't get a hard-rock track landing in the middle of a Sunday lunch.
How the audio side holds up
Picked tracks pass through the same chain as everything else: SpnSound levelling so volume stays consistent across decades and masters, and SpnMix for the handoff in and out. A 1978 soul record and a 2024 release shouldn't force anyone behind the bar to reach for the volume dial, and they don't.
This matters more than it sounds. Most of the perceived "cheapness" of ad hoc music in venues comes from level jumps and abrupt cuts, not from the song choice itself.
Getting started
CherryPick is available in the SpinLoud dashboard for existing channels. It's worth a short setup conversation rather than switching it on blind — deciding who picks, in which dayparts, and with what limits takes about fifteen minutes and saves a lot of drift later.
If you'd rather start conservatively, a common approach is to enable picks for managers only, in evening hours, for the first month, then widen access once you've seen what comes through.
The broader idea behind CherryPick is simple enough: good venue music isn't a choice between rigid programming and a free-for-all. Your channel should hold its shape all week and still have room for the song that belongs to tonight.