As Chris said, this is indeed some ooooooold news... But still funny. I saved the image to my hard disk and I show it to my friends every now and then. Most of them are mostly Coldplay/Muse/other-less-smart-rock so I have fun of them for a while, and then we all think/say "I'll listen to some Beethoven from next week on"... We never acomplish that
While this has been a well known fact for a long time and it is nice to see it on paper, we cannot really prove this to be true, at least, not with this data. While the study's site shows that student(s) from 1,352 schools participated in the study, we cannot deny the fact that this study was done with a relatively small population. In 2010, 1.6 million students in the United States alone took the SATs (www.campusprogress.org). Also, we do not know much about the tested population. All we know is:
- They were college-bound high school students who took the SAT.
- The top 133 artists chosen by students in 1,352 schools.
Where in the country were these students? Were they evenly dispersed, or bunched in certain areas? Were these public / private institutions, religion / race / gender specific, etc.? Were the number of test-takers per band / group equal? There are too many variables that were not properly controlled.
The bottom line: While we all know that we are obviously smart, but unfortunately, this study just isn't enough to prove it.
You can't just say that an entire fanbase of any band / music artist are all bright people. That's stupid. There are some dumb people that like good music and there are some smart people that like bad music.
You'd have to be smart to recognise that a 30 year old, decidedly uncool band is worth listening to.
From my experience the people who like U2 are generally more intelligent than the rest.
That being said, they're a lot of stupid U2 fans as well - but then again U2's music has gotten somwehat stupider (especially Bono's lyrics) since Pop, so perhaps songs like Elevation are attracting a less intelligent bunch of fans?
