Think of it this way (i know i'm contradicting my earlier posts) The study really doesn't show any cause and effect evidence. Maybe being really intelligent makes you want to listen to Beethoven, and not the other way around.
Think about it people who are pompously self-aware of their own IQ level are going to listen to music that they associate with their own genius. "my friends all listen to indie rock music, but i'm gifted so I listen to the beethoven that my yuppie over-achiever parents have been cramming down my throat since I was in the womb". something like that......or not.

That's how I see it. I'm sure there's plenty of smart people who listen to Lil Wayne or TI or Nickelback and still stay smart.

No, everyone who listens to Nickelback is, in fact, stupid.

So Jazz fans are generally more stupid than fans of Disturbed?

I'm pretty sure a critical error was made here, unless this includes smooth jazz.

Also, if Sufjan Stevens is music for smart people then I take pride in being stupid.

I think a lot of it has to do with social class too. Colleges with higher average SAT scores tend to be more expensive. This explains why Beethoven, someone I'm willing to bet is listened to by more upperclass people, is associated with the higher SAT (more expensive) schools while Soca, a form of music listened to mostly by West Indian immigrants, is associated with lower SAT (less expensive) schools.

No, there's such a thing as an intelligent person having bad taste in music.

Not rare at all.

The guy admits that it indicates correlation over causation so the title is really just an attention seeking hook.

And I know plenty of very intelligent people with rather deplorable musical tastes.

Music that makes you dumb...


...turn on the radio to pop music.

From the FAQ on that site : "Most of the musical artists are popular across wide SAT ranges"

Since the data is not consistent, that makes it a lot harder to say listening to that band makes it more likely that you are dumb or smart. I expect if the sample size was bigger and the selection of participants more representative, then the differences here between bands would smoothen out more.

And of course music doesn't make you dumb .. It's just a hook.

edit :

Just for fun and to prove a little point, I used my own die-roller script to generate 10 numbers between 1 and 400 which is roughly the range of the SAT scores. Then I divided each value by 10 to get the averages.

These are the numbers I got :

160,6
174,0
194,7
220,9
210,4
241,7
181,0
162,7
209,3
221,9

Most of them are relatively uniformly distributed around the mean, but I've bolded the highest and lowest scores. What you can see here is that even though we know the real average here is ~200, we have one value at 160 and one at 240.

(To check if the average is ~200, I can pick 1000 numbers between 1 and 400 and see if that approximates 200000 .. then I get 196325. 196325/1000 = 196,325 ~ 200)

If you say that 240 is U2 and MC Hammer is 160, then you can draw the conclusion that people listening to MC Hammer are more stupid than people listening to U2. However, in this example, it doesn't matter what they listen to since they are all random numbers. The difference is explained by stochastics, random chance. I don't know what kind of numbers of observations he has behind each group here, but I assume they are very small numbers and that makes it almost certain that random chance will mess with his results. F.ex, how many people are behind Beethoven's ratings on the chart?

Abuse of statistics, I think.

I used my powers to take back bad comments.

I find it funny the country artists are consistently at the low scoring level throughout this chart.

Not sure if it's accurate, but it was a fun idea.

All the nerds at my school always listened to shitty pop-trash. This study is irrevelant.