By Con Raso, managing director, Tuned Global

Music and movement are neurologically intertwined. Tempo influences pace, rhythm supports endurance, and familiar tracks can reduce perceived exertion.

Beyond physiology, music creates shared moments. It sets the atmosphere, builds anticipation and turns individual activity into collective experience.

For sports, wellness and fitness brands, this means music selection needs to align with brand values, customer experiences and emotional outcomes.

Well-chosen music increases workout intensity and duration, improves customer retention, strengthens brand recognition, creates community and cultural relevance, and opens new partnership models.

When delivered through properly licensed, data-informed systems, these outcomes become measurable and scalable.

Music also gives brands a way to stay culturally connected to their audience. The question for operators is how to use music strategically and legally.

This is especially important because the way brands approach music has changed significantly.

Early adoption in wellness, fitness and leisure centres often meant plugging in a Spotify playlist and hoping for the best.

Today’s leading sports and fitness innovators are far more sophisticated, curating music experiences that are brand-led, data-informed, tailored to specific audiences and workouts and fully licensed for commercial use.

This shift is being powered by specialist music technology platforms like Tuned Global, which works behind the scenes with brands to manage licensing, catalogue access, analytics and distribution at scale.

Rather than forcing sports brands to become music experts, these platforms allow them to offer legally compliant music in commercial environments, control curation across locations or content formats, and adapt music to different activities and intensities.

Through advanced APIs and centralised cloud infrastructure, operators can manage licensing, catalogue access and music governance at scale, while maintaining full creative control.

They also provide the reporting required by rights holders and integrate music into apps, devices, wearables and connected platforms. The result is music that feels intentional, on-brand and deeply embedded in the experience.

Music in action

Lululemon Studio and Mirror: At-home Fitness and Health

When Lululemon acquired Mirror, it marked a shift towards fully connected, at-home fitness where content, coaching and atmosphere converge.

Music plays a key role in making those workouts feel immersive and motivating, especially without a physical studio or shared space.

Instructors needed access to curated, commercially licensed music delivered consistently across live and on-demand workouts, while remaining compliant with music rights regulations.

Tuned Global provided Lululemon Studio with a branded playlisting app solution that enabled instructors to curate fully licensed music tailored to each workout.

Drawing from a licensed commercial catalogue and supported by usage reporting to rights holders, the system ensured compliance while giving instructors the flexibility to design high-energy, brand-aligned sessions.

The result was a seamless blend of movement, coaching and sound that makes digital workouts feel immersive and premium.

Psycle London: Performance Led Experiences

                     Con Raso

Boutique fitness studio Psycle London has built a loyal following by transforming workouts into performance-led experiences where music is central to the brand.

Each class is choreographed to sound, with instructors designing sessions that build emotional peaks and sustained intensity.

As Psycle expanded its digital and on-demand offering, it needed a way to give more than 70 instructors access to fully licensed commercial music while protecting the business from legal and reputational risk.

Tuned Global delivered a branded playlisting app that enabled Psycle’s instructors to search a cleared commercial catalogue by artist, genre or BPM, preview full tracks and build tailored playlists for classes ranging from high-intensity rides to strength and conditioning.

Behind the scenes, the music is delivered through secure API infrastructure integrated into Psycle’s own platform, with automated reporting to rights holders and support across label and publishing negotiations.

By combining creative flexibility with licensing governance, Psycle were able to scale its music-led experience across studio and digital environments without compromising on brand integrity, compliance or operational control.

Steezy: Movement and Music

Steezy, one of the world’s leading online dance platforms, sits at the intersection of sport, movement and music.

For dancers, music is not background sound. It defines timing, style and expression.

As Steezy scaled internationally, music became both its greatest asset and its biggest operational challenge. Delivering classes built around commercial tracks created both operational complexity and significant licensing risk.

Tuned Global provided the licensed music catalogue delivery infrastructure that enabled Steezy instructors to search a cleared catalogue, curate playlists tailored to specific classes, and prepare sessions using full commercial tracks.

The system ensured that music used across Steezy’s app and desktop platform was properly licensed and reported to rights holders, supporting global expansion without exposing the business or its creators to legal liability.

By combining instructor-friendly tooling with robust licensing governance, Steezy was able to continue growing its international dance community while keeping music at the centre of the experience.

A wider wellness ecosystem

For wellness, sports, fitness and leisure operators considering deeper music integration, a few principles stand out.

First, treat music as a product feature. It should support the outcome you want, whether that is higher intensity, calm recovery, emotional connection or brand recognition.

Second, get licensing right from day one. Using consumer streaming services in commercial environments exposes brands to legal and reputational risk.

For example, In 2019, more than 20 music publishing groups filed a $150 million copyright lawsuit against Peloton, alleging the company used more than 1000 unlicensed songs in its workout videos.

In another example, just last year the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia ordered a Sydney gym chain owner and five of his companies to pay more than $235,000 in damages and interest after operating multiple locations without a valid OneMusic licence.

Third, give creators freedom while maintaining brand control. Instructors, coaches and athletes bring personality, so give them tools to curate music safely within brand guidelines.

Last but not least, use data to refine the experience.

Track how music impacts engagement, completion rates and retention, because music is measurable. Finally, think cross-platform.

Your music strategy should work across physical venues, mobile apps, connected devices and on-demand content. Consistency builds trust.

What’s ahead for music as a performance tool

Music in wellness will become even more adaptive. As AI, biofeedback and real-time analytics become more embedded in fitness technology, music will increasingly respond dynamically to heart rate, pace or emotional state.

Early implementations in health and performance environments are already demonstrating how adaptive music can optimise outcomes.

As wearable technology and connected fitness continue to evolve, music will play an increasingly central role in shaping personalised experiences.

The infrastructure choices operators make now will determine how easily they can adopt these capabilities later. Those who invest early in licensed, data-informed music systems will be best placed to innovate without risk.

Music is a performance tool, a brand asset and a powerful lever for engagement. The examples above show that this applies at every scale, from a single boutique studio to a global combat sports brand.

The most successful innovators understand that when music and movement align, something special happens. With the right technology and licensing in place, that can scale.

About Con Raso, Managing Director of Tuned Global

Con Raso is an entrepreneur passionate about innovation, new technologies, and start-ups.

Over the last few decades he has focused on creating innovative mobile and online distribution models within the B2C entertainment market, enabling brands to utilise music as a marketing tool, via unique customer engagement strategies.

Being inherently well-versed in both technology and music, Con ensures our solutions are aesthetically pleasing, engaging and disruptive.

About Tuned Global

Tuned Global is the leading data-driven Cloud Music Platform that empowers businesses to integrate commercial music into their apps or launch complete streaming experiences using advanced APIs, real-time analytics, licensing solutions, music intelligence and customisable white-label apps.

Our turnkey solutions for music, audio, and video, coupled with a broad ecosystem of third-party music tech integrations, make us the most comprehensive platform for powering digital music projects.

We streamline complexities in licensing, rights management, content delivery and music discovery, enabling rapid innovation and bringing new ideas to life.

Since 2011, we’ve supported 40+ companies in 70+ countries — across telecom, fitness, media, aviation, and more — to deliver innovative music experiences faster and more cost-effectively.

For more information, visit www.tunedglobal.com.

Only 18 per cent of UK workplaces have a menopause policy, according to a new survey. while half of 1,000 women said they feel supported during menopause at work.

The study found that 37 per cent of respondents said their employer does not provide any menopause support at all. 

The new study, commissioned by women’s wellness specialist Serenova for International Women’s Day, surveyed perimenopausal, menopausal or post-menopausal women aged 30 or over.

Elle Sheppard, global head of marketing and communications at Serenova, said: “Mid-life women have so many pressures to face, the last thing they need is to feel like they have to suffer in silence at work, or worse, get forced into leaving a career they love due to a lack of support.

“Going through the menopause, including the peri and post stages, can last for years; this isn’t just a ‘flash in the pan’ day when you don’t feel your best, it’s a long period of lacking confidence, feeling exhausted and putting up with physical pain too.

The findings come as the government launched its gender pay gap and menopause action plan guidance on 4 March 2026, which will be compulsory for large businesses by April 2027.

Women working in healthcare and social services reported feeling the most supported, with 57 per cent agreeing they feel “somewhat” or “very” supported.

This was followed by public services, law and security at 53 per cent, education and non-profit at 52 per cent, and business, finance and professional services at 48 per cent.

Women working in retail reported feeling the least supported, at 44 per cent.

Among healthcare and social services workers, 36 per cent said their employer does not provide any support provisions, 22 per cent said their workplace had a menopause policy and 16 per cent said their employer provided counselling support. Just 7 per cent had access to menopause leave.

In comparison, 15 per cent of retail workers said their workplace had a menopause policy, 8 per cent had counselling and 10 per cent had menopause leave.

This was higher than in healthcare and social services, where just 7 per cent had menopause leave.

Regionally, workers in London reported feeling the most supported, with 59 per cent agreeing they feel “somewhat” or “very” supported, nine per cent higher than the national total.

The South East followed at 55 per cent, while Yorkshire and the Humber ranked lowest at 45 per cent.

Sheppard said: “Serenova was launched on International Women’s Day last year, with a goal of helping women take charge of their wellbeing so they can navigate this life phase with clarity and confidence.

“As we celebrate our first anniversary, we wanted to find out how supported women really feel, to shine a light on the reality of navigating midlife as a woman.”

By Zahra Bhatti, founder and CEO, Véa

We are living through a measurement boom.

Wrist-worn wearables ship in the hundreds of millions IDC forecast worldwide shipments at 537.9 million units in 2024, with 136.5 million units shipped in Q2 2025 alone.

We can track steps, sleep stages, heart rate, HRV, temperature, glucose variability and recovery scores.

We have never had more physiological insight into the human body.

So why are women still burning out? Still overwhelmed? Still carrying invisible cognitive load that never appears on a single dashboard?

If the data revolution in health tech was supposed to empower women, why do so many feel more monitored than supported?

A number on your wrist can tell you what happened in your body. It rarely tells you why it happened, what it meant or what you need next.

That missing layer is emotional data. And femtech is uniquely positioned to build it.

We Built Dashboards. We Didn’t Build Interpretation.

Picture this.

It’s 6:47am. You’ve been up since 4 with a teething toddler, made packed lunches on autopilot, managed a meltdown at the school gates and arrived at your desk already running on fumes.

Your watch buzzes. Sleep score: 38. Stress: High. Recovery: Poor. Thanks. You already knew.

This is the problem no one in health tech wants to name.

Wearables are extraordinary at capturing signals but measurement without meaning stops at awareness.

Your HRV dips and a notification pings. It cannot tell you whether that dip came from the argument you didn’t finish with your partner, the guilt of missing bedtime again, the weight of being the only one who remembers the GP appointment or the hormonal crash of your luteal phase hitting while all of it lands at once.

The sensor caught the signal but it missed the entire story.

The evidence backs up what women already feel in their bones.

While activity trackers can increase step counts, a Lancet Digital Health umbrella review found their effect on broader psychological wellbeing is limited.

A 2024 systematic review went further, calling the evidence for wearables improving mental health “extremely limited”.

The sensors work but the interpretation doesn’t. That gap between data and meaning is exactly where women fall through.

Women’s Mental Health Is Not a Niche Concern. It Is a Systems Failure.

Consider the architecture of burden women navigate daily.

Depression is approximately 1.5 times more common among women than men, according to the World Health Organization.

The gender gap emerges at puberty and persists through the lifespan, driven by biological, psychological and social factors that compound over decades.

In the UK, 26.2 per cent of women reported high anxiety in the most recent ONS quarterly data, compared with 18.8 per cent of men – a gap that has remained statistically significant for over a decade.

But here is the question nobody in wellness tech seems to be asking: where does all that invisible labour live in the data?

Globally, women perform 2.5 times more unpaid care and domestic work than men.

That is time, emotional bandwidth and cognitive effort that never surfaces in economic metrics or health dashboards.

Forty-five percent of working-age women are outside the labour force because of unpaid care responsibilities, compared with just 5 per cent of men.

For those who do stay at work, the toll compounds: CIPD research found that 67 per cent of women aged 40–60 experiencing menopause symptoms report a mostly negative impact at work, with 79 per cent feeling less able to concentrate and one in six considering leaving their role entirely.

These are not isolated statistics.

They describe accumulated cognitive and emotional load across a lifetime a compounding interest of stress that no single intervention can repay.

Yet most wellness technologies still focus on optimisation metrics such as: output, recovery, movement and productivity.

Women do not simply need better tracking. They need systems that reduce the burden of self-interpretation.

When did we decide that measuring a woman’s body was more important than understanding what she’s carrying inside it?

Emotions Are Not Soft Signals. They Are Early Data.

Emotions are routinely dismissed as subjective, anecdotal and too messy to measure.

But from a systems perspective, they are high-frequency signals about safety versus threat, capacity versus overload, connection versus isolation and alignment versus self-betrayal.

They are early-warning indicators arriving long before burnout becomes clinical, long before sleep deteriorates especially long before productivity drops.

Physiology lags behind the emotional moment.

Your heart rate spikes after the confrontation. Your sleep fragments after a week of over-functioning. Your inflammation markers will never capture the micro-stresses that accumulated all day. Emotions do.

They are the body’s first responders faster than cortisol, more specific than HRV, more honest than any self-reported wellness score.

When emotional data is captured consistently, patterns emerge that no wearable can detect alone: anxiety clustering after specific meetings, energy dipping during certain cycle phases, irritability rising after relational overextension, creative clarity following solitude or movement.

This is not mood tracking for novelty. This becomes behavioural pattern recognition – the diagnostic layer women have been missing and needing.

From Self-Optimisation to Self-Understanding

We have built extraordinary tools to measure the female body.

We have not yet built infrastructure to interpret the emotional load women carry daily, the invisible labour, the relational tension, the hormonal transitions and most importantly the resulting cognitive overload.

These forces rarely appear in a recovery score rather they show up unmistakably in emotional patterns.

Imagine: a wearable detects sustained stress variability. An emotional check-in identifies relational strain. Context shows deadline pressure and reduced recovery. The system responds not with another metric, but with a small, realistic intervention that fits your life.

From dashboard to preventative mental health infrastructure. THIS is the golden opportunity femtech has to lead.

When emotions are treated as structured, longitudinal data rather than vague self-expression, they become a preventative signal.

They reveal when capacity is shrinking, when boundaries are leaking, when resilience is building. They show what no heart rate monitor ever could: the moment a woman stops prioritising herself, and the pattern that follows.

This shift is already beginning.

Platforms like Véa are building emotional operating systems that treat emotions as legitimate health data translating micro-check-ins and pattern recognition into contextual insight, reducing the invisible labour of self-analysis rather than adding to it.

Not more optimisation. Not more self-surveillance. Structured self-understanding that actually lightens the load.

In a world saturated with metrics, the competitive advantage is no longer more data. It is better meaning.

Emotions remain the most underutilised dataset in women’s health. Femtech has the infrastructure, the audience and the moment to build the missing layer.

The question is whether it will.