Walk into any of our locations during opening hours and you will notice something. Nobody at the front desk is scrolling through Spotify looking for a playlist. Nobody in the kitchen is picking songs based on their own mood that morning. The music simply plays, and it plays the same way, with the same intention, across every EDGE Workspaces location, every day, from open to close.
That is not an accident. It is the result of a partnership with Kollekt.FM, a company that spent months getting to know us before they curated a single playlist. We call the project The Sound of EDGE Workspaces, and we sat down with Joakim from Kollekt.FM to talk about what that process actually looked like, why we decided to hand our sound over to professionals, and what it means for the people who spend their days in our spaces.
At EDGE Workspaces, we run private offices, coworking memberships, meeting and event spaces, in venues built for networking and collaboration, all wrapped in a hospitality-first way of operating. Every one of those products depends on how a space feels, not only how it looks. Good design gets people through the door. What keeps them there, comfortable and productive, is everything else, including the sound in the room. That is the thinking that led us to Kollekt.FM in the first place.
Sign up for our newsletter
Want to read more about our
stories on flexible work?
Want to read more about our stories on flexible work?
Who’s Behind the Decks
Kollekt.FM was founded in 2013, back when Spotify and curated playlists were not yet the norm. Music lived on Facebook groups, YouTube channels and SoundCloud pages, scattered across the internet rather than organised into anything useful. The founder built a community platform that let people pull tracks out of those Facebook groups and turn them into proper playlists. Nightclubs were the first to use it, then restaurants, and eventually the idea grew into something bigger: a business built for brands.
What has not changed since 2013 is the human element. Kollekt.FM works with professional DJs and music curators rather than algorithms. No AI picks the tracks. A person, someone trained to hear the emotional value in a piece of music, does. Everything is still built in-house too, with no external software standing between the curators and the playlist. As Joakim put it, music is not background, it is identity, and identity is a human thing. It is also, in his words, about sharing. That philosophy is exactly why we chose them.
There is a practical side to that choice too. Kollekt.FM is licensed for commercial, public-facing use in a way that streaming apps such as Spotify, YouTube or Apple Music are not built to support. Playing a personal streaming account through a shared workspace was never really what those services were designed for. Across several locations, every single day, that difference matters.
For a brand like ours, hospitality-led, people-focused, that matched our own approach far better than a generic playlist service ever could. EDGE Workspaces gets a dedicated music curator at Kollekt.FM, someone who understands our brand specifically and refreshes the selection on a monthly basis. It is a delegated, ongoing relationship rather than a one-off job, which means the sound can evolve the way our locations do.
Getting to Know Us First
Before Kollekt.FM curated a track list, they came to understand who we are. The process started with an intake covering multiple interviews, visits to our locations and conversations with key stakeholders across the team. From there, workshops helped identify the sound that connects to coworking, to wellbeing, and to the EDGE Workspaces brand itself.
This was not a five-minute brief. It was a proper discovery process, the same kind of care we put into designing our physical spaces. We build high-quality, hospitality-led environments, so it made sense to reinforce that environment with an equally considered soundtrack, rather than leave it to whichever streaming algorithm happened to be logged in that day.
Well-chosen music does more than fill silence. It positively reflects the space itself and the people inside it, which sits close to the actual goal of a workspace: creating a genuine sense of wellbeing for both our team and our clients. That is a harder brief than it sounds, and it is exactly why the discovery phase mattered so much before anyone touched a playlist.
Two Vibes, One Rhythm
Coworking has its own rhythm, and Kollekt.FM designed the music around it. Two settings run through the day. The first is built for focus: the productive hours of the morning and the stretch after lunch, when people need concentration rather than distraction. The second is more social, tuned to the moments when energy naturally shifts, such as people arriving in the morning or the lighter mood of a Thursday or Friday afternoon.
In practice that means four playlists running across each location, Calm Focus and Upbeat Focus for the working hours, Easy Vibes and Uplifting Vibes for the social ones. Together they follow the shape of a working day, from the morning arrival through lunch to a Thursday evening drink, changing automatically so nobody on our team has to remember to press play.
Every coworking space needs a focus playlist, that much is common across the industry. What sets EDGE Workspaces apart is the hospitality layer on top of it. We are not only about concentration. We are about the social side too, the smile at the door, the upbeat welcome rather than something mellow and forgettable. That recognisable, social energy is where our approach genuinely differs from a typical coworking soundtrack.
The Sound Rules
Getting the vibe right meant being just as clear about what to avoid as what to include. The brief called for something elegant, high quality and, above all, non-intrusive. A little happy, but leaning more towards motivational and uplifting than anything too playful. No loud tracks. No hard music. No intrusive horn solos. No long intros or outros that pull attention away from work. No two tracks repeating across the rotation, so the day never feels like it is looping, and no sudden jumps in volume from one song to the next. Consistency in energy levels mattered as much as the songs themselves, so the day never lurches from one mood to another.
The curation went further than genre and tempo. Kollekt.FM made a deliberate choice to feature female artists alongside male ones, a decision that reflects the vibe of our spaces rather than defaulting to what is easiest. Explicit language was avoided throughout, though no particular lyrical themes were ruled out beyond that. The focus stayed on modern music, the kind that shapes today’s culture, with occasional nods to older tracks that inspired it. This is a soundtrack built for right now, with a memory of where the sound came from.
None of this happened by instinct. Every decision, from tempo to lyrics to the balance of voices, traces back to those early workshops and interviews, the difference between a curated sound and a playlist thrown together on a Tuesday afternoon.
Made By People, For People
The hardest part of the whole process was not choosing songs. It was balancing two very different audiences. Members are only in our spaces for part of the day, popping into their office or a meeting room and leaving again. Our own team, particularly the people at reception, are there for eight hours, five days a week. They used to play their own playlists, their own taste, and now they listen to something chosen for them. Keeping that team happy while covering a genuinely wide range of tastes was, by Joakim’s own account, the biggest challenge of the project.
Could music this deliberate ever work against people rather than for them? Kollekt.FM engineered the playlists to be non-distracting, directly supporting the flow state that good focus work needs. Change is difficult for some people regardless of what changes, and taste in music is famously personal, so not every reaction will be positive. People also move between locations and sit in meetings often enough that no single playlist is ever the only soundtrack to their day.
In practice, Joakim told us, repetition has not been a real issue. What matters is that the choices are not arbitrary. They come from people who understand our brand and our spaces, working with professionals who understand music, and anyone who genuinely prefers their own sound can always reach for headphones.
Flex the Vibe
Standardised does not mean rigid. Community managers at each location can still adjust the mood for a few hours when it is needed, for an event, for a busier-than-usual day, or simply because the room could use something calmer or more upbeat than the default that day. The system gives every location a consistent baseline while leaving room for the people running it day to day to read the room and respond to it.
A quiet Tuesday morning and a packed community event call for two different atmospheres, even in the same room. Giving our teams the ability to shift the vibe, without throwing out the curation behind it, keeps hospitality at the centre of the detail, not only the big gestures.
Take the Focus With You
There is one more part of this project we are genuinely excited about. Kollekt.FM built us an exclusive playlist on Spotify called Deep Focus by EDGE Workspaces, drawn directly from the focus playlists already playing across our coworking spaces. It captures that same elegant, non-intrusive, motivating energy, minus the walls, so you can take it with you wherever you happen to be working from.
Working from home and missing the atmosphere of your usual EDGE Workspaces location? Commuting and want to arrive already in the right headspace? Deep Focus by EDGE Workspaces is built for exactly those moments. It carries the same restraint and intention as the version playing in our spaces right now, no jarring transitions, no distracting lyrics, just a steady, uplifting backdrop for getting things done.
Search for Deep Focus by EDGE Workspaces on Spotify, add it to your library, and bring a little of that curated focus with you on the way to work, at your kitchen table, or wherever the day takes you. It is a small thing, but it is one more way we try to extend the experience of our spaces beyond our four walls.
The Next Track
Music is one of the many experiments of EDGE Workspaces, surely not the last. We want to get this right for something as personal as taste in music, and the same thinking applies to wellness, food and drink, or the art on our walls. Joakim’s own words say it best: arrive with a smile, leave with a smile. That is what The Sound of EDGE Workspaces set out to do, and it echoes our own slogan: Where Wellbeing Works.
We are always open to hearing from brands and partners who share that thinking and want to help shape what comes next in our spaces. Got an idea for EDGE Workspaces? We would love to talk.
