Does loud music make people drink more?

Maybe you’ve been to a party where the music kept getting louder, and before long everyone was standing at the bar because nobody could hear each other anyway. If you’re hosting a company party, you may have heard that loud music makes people drink faster, and you might be wondering whether that’s true.

It might, but the evidence is thin. Most of what you’ll read traces back to a 2008 study in two French bars, where 40 men drank with the music either at its usual level or turned up. It reported that the men ordered more beer and finished each glass faster when the music was louder.

There are questions about the research group behind it, though. In March 2023, the journal that published the same group’s earlier 2004 bar study added an “expression of concern” to it, which is a notice warning readers that a paper’s results may not be reliable. Several of the lead author’s other papers were retracted between 2019 and 2025. The 2008 paper itself carries no notice, but no other research group has repeated the experiment in a bar.

In a bigger 2012 study, researchers made 237 visits to 60 bars in four European cities, rating things like how loud each bar was and how drunk the customers were. The louder bars had drunker customers. Once the researchers took other things about those bars into account, like how late it was and how permissive the staff were, the loudness on its own no longer predicted how drunk people were.

In a lab, music of any kind seems to. In a 2013 British study, 45 women each drank one alcoholic drink with slow music, fast music or no music. They finished the drink faster with music than in silence, and the tempo made no difference. The catch is that it was a lab, with about 15 people in each group, and it compared music with silence, so it doesn’t tell us anything about volume.

Music can also change how a drink tastes. In a 2012 lab study of 80 people, drinks tasted sweeter when music was playing. When people had music plus a distracting task, they were worse at telling how strong a drink was.

A researcher who studies restaurant acoustics has measured how loud it can get before guests stop being able to talk. Two people standing at arm’s length can keep a conversation going with up to about 71 decibels of sound around them. At 77 decibels, a guest can only talk to the person right beside them. One large banquet the same researcher measured, across three halls, ran at 83 to 87 decibels, louder than either of those.

The 2008 study’s authors guessed that when people can’t talk, they drink instead, though we haven’t seen anyone measure it. There’s also a longer read on why restaurants play their music so loud, if you’ve ever wondered.

In our experience, the simplest approach is to keep the part of the party where people are meant to talk at a level they can talk across, and to let the dance floor later on be louder on purpose. Live musicians can hear the crowd and adjust from one song to the next. For more on levels, check out our post on how loud background music should be.

If you’re planning a company holiday party, we’re glad to help you pick an act that suits both the talking and the dancing.