Photo: Eva Rinaldi

Apparently the background music you hear in stores and restaurants isn't just meant to entertain or provide an ambience to the place. It also helps generate more sales.

For restaurants, one of their optimal songs would be Ed Sheeran's major hit "Shape of You."

The song was identified as part of a massive research study conducted by the Swedish Retail Institute and Soundtrack Your Brand, which found that songs specially selected for different store environments and audiences increased sales by 9 percent over 2 million purchases at an unnamed American fast food joint.

In fast food restaurants alone, burger and fry sales went up by around 9 percent each, whereas dessert sales increased by a whopping 15 percent.

How does this all work? Apparently music is able to trigger feelings in our brain, which then gets associated with whatever item we're looking at. Basically, we begin to associate music with emotions with food.

The Spotify-backed business, Soundtrack Your Brand, utilized this knowledge to source music that would express the brand of whatever shop or restaurant music is being played in. When it came to fast food, "Shape of You" was perfect to target millennial audiences looking for a "welcoming, modern, and expressive" environment.

I'm gonna experiment for myself and see if I buy more while playing that song on my Spotify next time I get fast food.