February 2026 — According to industry reports, B2B music streaming company Soundtrack Technologies (formerly Soundtrack Your Brand) has announced the acquisition of UK-based background music provider Ambie and Belgium/Netherlands-based platform Tunify, further strengthening its presence in the UK and Benelux region.
Following the acquisitions, both companies will operate under the Soundtrack brand while retaining their local teams. This move significantly enhances Soundtrack’s local market expertise, cultural music knowledge, and regional customer relationships across key European territories.
Soundtrack was originally founded in 2013 as a joint venture with Spotify under the name Spotify Business, later rebranding to Soundtrack Your Brand and ultimately to Soundtrack Technologies. Today, the company claims thousands of direct licensing agreements with rightsholders and maintains a catalog exceeding 125 million tracks, serving customers in more than 75 countries.
Commercial Music Is Shifting Toward Platformization and Ecosystem Integration
Soundtrack’s acquisitions reflect a broader transformation across the commercial music sector: the evolution from simple background music services toward full-scale, platform-driven ecosystems that combine content, cloud management, analytics, and hardware integration.
Beyond Soundtrack, a growing number of B2B music platforms are competing globally, including:
- Mood Media / Muzak – a long-established provider of commercial music and in-store experience solutions
- Cloud Cover Music – focused on licensed streaming for retail, hospitality, and service businesses
- SoundMachine – offering cloud-managed background music and local playback systems
- Rockbot – popular in restaurants, gyms, and hospitality environments
- PlayNetwork / Custom Channels – specializing in branded audio experiences
While these platforms differ in content strategy and user experience, they share a common structural reality: they do not manufacture amplification or multi-zone audio hardware themselves. Reliable sound reproduction and zone distribution still depend on specialized hardware platforms.
Content Platforms and Hardware Systems: Two Pillars of Commercial Audio
Modern commercial audio systems increasingly consist of two tightly coupled layers:
Commercial Music Platforms
- Licensed music catalogs
- AI-driven scheduling and playlists
- Remote device management
- Multi-location account control
Audio Hardware & System Infrastructure
- Amplification and power delivery
- Multi-zone distribution
- Audio routing and matrix control
- Integration with automation systems
Only when these two layers work together can a scalable, reliable commercial audio solution be achieved.
OpenAudio and HOLOWHAS: Hardware Foundation for Commercial Music Deployment
OpenAudio is an audio technology company offering multiple product families, including the HOLOWHAS brand, which is specifically focused on multi-zone and commercial audio platforms.
HOLOWHAS multi-zone systems provide:
- Enterprise-grade stability
- Scalable zone expansion
- Network-based control architecture
- Flexible integration with third-party platforms
This makes HOLOWHAS well suited as a hardware foundation for commercial music services that require consistent multi-zone playback across retail, hospitality, office, healthcare, and large venue environments.
Importantly:
- OpenAudio is the parent company
- HOLOWHAS is a commercial/multi-zone product brand under OpenAudio
Together, they address the hardware layer of the commercial music ecosystem.
From “Music Playback” to “Commercial Audio Infrastructure”
The industry is moving beyond the idea of background music as a standalone service. Commercial audio systems are becoming:
- Platform-driven
- Remotely managed
- Zone-aware
- Integrated with building automation and control systems
This creates strong demand for hardware platforms that can reliably translate cloud-based music services into high-quality, multi-zone audio output.
In this context:
- Music platforms focus on content, licensing, and experience
- Hardware platforms focus on output, distribution, and system reliability
- Integrators connect both sides into deployable solutions
Market Opportunity Continues to Expand
Industry estimates suggest that over 100 million commercial locations worldwide use music to enhance customer experience, generating an estimated $40 billion in incremental annual retail value.
Global brands across retail, hospitality, dining, and lifestyle sectors increasingly rely on platform-based commercial music combined with professional audio infrastructure.
This growth benefits not only music streaming platforms, but also hardware manufacturers that enable scalable, multi-zone deployment.
Conclusion
Soundtrack’s acquisition of Ambie and Tunify is more than a regional expansion story—it signals a deeper structural shift in the commercial music industry toward platform consolidation and ecosystem partnerships.
As commercial music platforms scale globally, hardware partners capable of delivering stable, multi-zone, and integratable audio systems will become increasingly strategic.
Within this evolving landscape, OpenAudio and its HOLOWHAS multi-zone platform are positioned as important contributors on the hardware side of the ecosystem, enabling commercial music services to be deployed reliably and at scale across diverse business environments.
Denise D. Pierce
5 Feb, 2026Platform consolidation feels inevitable once licensing, reporting, and loudness-normalised logs become mission-critical. The winners won’t just stream audio, they’ll expose APIs that let integrators fold music into automation, POS, and occupancy analytics. OpenAudio’s routing groups already treat playlists as data sources; the next leap is bidirectional feeds so the same amp that delivers background music can return foot-fall-correlated play counts to the client’s BI dashboard. That’s when “background audio” becomes a measurable business KPI instead of a line-item cost.