Fun with music studies, polls, and surveys

Not a week goes by without my inbox being filled by the results of music-related studies and surveys. Some are rather useful. Others, not so much.

I’m a curious fellow when it comes to music and how the world interacts with it. This makes me a sucker for press releases touting brand-new information about music and … well, it could be anything.

Usually, it’s the results of a study commissioned by an ad agency on behalf of a client (often a gambling site but it could also be anything from a mortgage broker to a sex toy company) to stealthily get some clicks and attention. The British are particularly good at camouflaging an ad by cloaking it with the aura of serious research.

Other times, though, it’s a report on some legitimate but quirky scientific work. The Daily Mail loves this sort of stuff.

Here is a, er, survey of recent surveys. studies, and polls that caught my attention.

This one, conducted for a secondary ticket seller called SeatPick, claimed to have measured the levels of love given to music by the citizens of cities around the world. It annoyed me greatly. According to their analysis, London is the greatest city for music, something I cannot dispute. But if you go through the top 50 survey cities, there’s not a single mention of Canada, a country that punches far, far, above its weight on the international stage. I don’t think they even bothered.

Credibility rating: 0 out of 10.

A study for College Rover looked at the best study buddy music and came to the conclusion that listening to metal while you cram is a bad idea. The only genre more distracting is hip-hop due to its dense lyrical content. Weirdly, 60 per cent of people with high grades self-identified as metal fans, I’m confused.

Credibility rating: 2 out of 10