Jasmine Moradi

Want to improve customer satisfaction and boost sales? Then pay attention to the music you play in your store. According to a study by music tech company Soundtrack Your Brand in collaboration with the Stockholm School of Economics, customers tend to stay 42 percent longer in stores where background music is played, compared to stores with no music at all. But beware before you push play on a random playlist from a streaming service: sales increase by 32 percent when songs reflect the brand’s identity and target audience. Best to choose the store’s soundtrack carefully, then.

Another study by Nielsen Music, also commissioned by Soundtrack Your Brand, surveyed over 5,000 small retailers in seven countries and found out 83 percent of them use personal accounts rather than business licenses to stream music, which costs the recording industry some 2.65 billion US dollars a year. Creators are supposed to get a higher compensation when their work is used for commercial purposes.

It’s not that retailers are trying to save money by streaming music from personal accounts, though. Nearly 70 percent of respondents consider music to be either “important” or “very important” for their businesses, and 86 percent are willing to pay for it. The thing is, they don’t know they were supposed to have a business account, as they do not read the terms of use in full. More than half of surveyed retailers incorrectly believe a personal music account gives them the right to use it for background music in their store — that percentage rises to 60 percent in the UK and 71 percent in the US.