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Ed Sheeran is making you fat

By | Published on Wednesday 5 April 2017

Ed Sheeran

A study by the Swedish Retail Institute and curated of playlists for brands Soundtrack Your Brand has found that curated playlists in shops can boost retail sales. Funny that. And it turns out that Ed Sheeran is particularly good at shifting burgers.

The study was carried out in Sweden at a mystery American burger chain, reports The Guardian. Analysing nearly two million sales, researchers found that certain songs could boost sales of burgers by 8.6%, chips by 8.8% and desserts by as much as 15.6%.

“Music triggers associations in our brain”, says consumer behaviour expert Philip Graves. “The way in which we process our environment is primarily unconscious. What gets passed through to us is a feeling, and that feeling is then misattributed to the thing we are looking at. [The result is that] we like that thing more”.

Spotify-backed start-up Soundtrack Your Brand recently raised $22 million for international expansion, so this study is seemingly timed to lay some groundwork for that (it’s clearly no coincidence that the brand chosen for the study was an American burger restaurant).

The company’s head of music Magnus Rydén says: “When you’re curating for a business, it’s important to really understand them. It’s about expressing that brand through music. Once we’ve got the parameters right, it comes down to our daily sourcing of new music”.

That said, he also admits that his team have as yet failed to find “the perfect burger-and-shake tune”, but says that Ed Sheeran’s ‘Shape Of You’ works particularly well in getting people to buy more food.



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