Study Proves Music Makes You Eat More

It seems that just like the right song can push you to finish that last mile (or first mile), the right music might also push you to spend more money on food. Who knew.

Related: Study Claims Women Don’t Eat Junk Food In Front of Attractive Men

Research released by Soundtrack Your Brand, a Spotify-founded and backed start up that, you guessed it, works to create playlists for businesses, revealed that the right playlist had a net 9 percent difference on sales at a global casual company. That’s a lot of dollars.

For the study, the company looked at more than 2,000 customer surveys and almost 2 million transactions at 16 locations of a food chain (they aren’t saying who, but it seems like it was McDonald’s) and tested four playlists: a mix of top 1,000 and less popular songs; a mix of the most popular songs; a random mix; and no music at all.

The company found that the tailored mix of top 1,000 songs and less popular songs boosted sales almost 5 percent. Random music hurt sales by around 4 percent and only playing the hits gave them a 1 percent boost. (No music was used as the baseline.)

Music had a the biggest effect on our sweet tooth: dessert sales rose 15.6 percent, suggesting the music made the people happy and enticed them to stay around longer.

Here’s what the Sven-Olov Daunfeldt, the professor who led the research, had to say:

“It’s a highly underutilized area, and it’s very important for businesses to try to tell consumers who they are by the music they play. I think this is the coolest research I’ve done.”

This doesn’t surprise us at all. We play music while we cook and during dinner all the time (though we have to admit we’re less discerning about our brand: Beyonce, Marc Anthony, Vampire Weekend, Rolling Stones, Mana, some old school El Gran Combo….). So it makes perfect sense to us that you’d stick around longer (and nosh some more) if you were feeling the vibe.

As for people ordering dessert because they were happy, well, duh.