Phish Fans Have An Average SAT Score of 1149 (On The Old SATs)

As it turns out, despite Howard Stern’s lampooning, Phish fans are actually smarter than the average fan.

A study performed by the site Music That Makes You Dumb has resulted in a comprehensive correlation between SAT Score and music preference. The site outlines the following guidelines of the study:

1. Get a friend of yours to download, using Facebook, the ten most frequent “favorite music” at every college via that college’s Network Statistics page on Facebook (manually — as not to violate Facebook’s ToS). These ten “favorite musics” are perhaps indicative of the overall intellectual milieu of that college.
2. Download the average SAT/ACT score (from CollegeBoard) for students attending every college.
3. Presto! We have a correlation between musical tastes and dumbitude (smartitude too)!

        Music <=> Colleges <=> Average SAT Scores

4. Plot the average SAT of each “favorite music”, discarding those with too few samples to have a reliable average.
5. Post the results on your website, pondering what the Internet will think of it.

Some interesting results from the study:

-Beethoven correlates to the highest SAT score (1371), while Lil Wayne correlates to the lowest (889). Of modern artists, Sufjan Stevens is the highest (1256).

-Phish fans scored a full 39 points higher than Grateful Dead fans, on average. Both bands were on the higher end of the spectrum, as Phish ranked in at #14 and the Dead at #29 (out of 133 total)

-Going by genre, “Classic Rock” fans had the highest SAT score (1041) while Soca, a Caribbean Soul genre, ranked in at the lowest (915).

Here’s the full plotting of artists and genres vs. SAT Scores. The vertical axis is meaningless. You can also read the full results, by list, here.