Launched in January, Audoo Recap brought together a full year of music played across public premises – automatically captured via our Audio Meter™ – and turned it into a personalised snapshot of how music lived in our shared spaces.

From standout tracks to unexpected patterns, it reflected the sound of public premises in a way that’s never previously been possible. Public performance tells a very different story to radio, streaming, background music suppliers and physical sales - it’s more varied, more contextual, and often more surprising.

This blog post will delve into our play data for 2025, highlighting the huge difference between public performance data and streaming charts; the difference between venue types and even the differences within multi-site organisations, where you may have expected very similar music across the group.

Comparing UK Public Performance to the UK Official Charts Company streaming / download chart

In summer last year, I compared the UK Official Charts Company half-year chart to the songs we’d seen in Public Performance, which brought to light the huge disparity between the charts and public performance plays. I thought it was worth starting this blog by sharing how 2025 ended up compared to the UK Official Chart 2025.

Following on from the half-year charts, the overlap between Public Performance and the streaming chart remains small - in fact it has decreased from 22 out of 40 in the half-year chart to only 17 songs in common.

The release decade of songs again differs hugely between Audoo’s Public Performance Chart and the Official Chart – the end of year Official Chart only has 3 non-2020’s songs in it, favouring recently releases tracks.  Whereas the Public Performance chart remains diverse to the half-year point with 17 non-2020’s songs, demonstrating public performance venues prefer an eclectic mix of songs across multiple decades.

The following table shows the songs that make up 2025 across the UK Official Charts and Public Performance plays. You can click the column headers to sort by the chart positions and explore the relative positions between the charts. You’ll see some huge differences with the song positions – the starkest example is the K-Pop Demon Hunters song Soda Pop that came in at number 36 on the UK Official Chart, but is way down at 8,682 in the public performance chart with just over a hundred plays in the year.

Comparing How Different Industries Play Music

We have Audio Meters installed in all sorts of venues, even less common places such as climbing gyms, car garages, spas or launderettes. In this section we’ll let you explore how music was played in our top five industries: Pubs, Clubs and Bars; Retail, Food and Drink; Fitness and Personal Care.

We’ve done the work to get the top ten songs played in 2025 across these industry types, going down to position 5000, so if the song was not in the top 5000 songs, you’ll see > 5000 in the cell. By clicking the headers, you can sort by the chart position for the industry to compare between them.

You’ll see, for example, that songs that are popular in pubs are never used in fitness or personal care and that retail has some big differences to restaurants.

This chart shows the how small the overlap between the industry types is:

Comparing plays within a specific chain

So, we’ve seen that different types of venues play very diverse music – which might seem obvious, but the extent of the differences is eye-opening. How about looking at diversity within a single chain of venues? Are they all playing the same music or are there different vibes more under the control of the local team?

One of our partners, True Pub Co, have kindly let us share some of their data. We’ve taken their top five pubs that played the most music last year and compare what they played. Each True Pub Co venue had its own musical identity, shaped by neighbourhoods, staff, and customers. From indie and post-punk to Americana rock, soul classics and 2000s dance-pop. No two venues sounded the same - you’ll see 44 songs below, meaning out of the top ten charts songs for each pub that only 6 songs overlapped!

As before, feel free to sort the table to compare between the pubs.

Wrapping Up

We hope you’ve enjoyed looking through the songs we’ve heard during 2025, investigating the differences between streaming and Public Performance charts; differences between how industries use music and uniqueness within a chain of pubs.

Finally, we’ve made Spotify Playlists for each of the 2025 charts for you to take a listen to…

Audoo Top Songs 2025

Audoo Top Songs for Pubs, Clubs, and Bars 2025

Audoo Top Songs for Retail 2025

Audoo Top Songs for Food and Drink 2025

Audoo Top Songs for Fitness 2025

Audoo Top Songs for Personal Care 2025