Ever wondered if your Spotify playlist says something about how your brain works?
Weirdly enough, scientists have actually looked into it, and the answer isn’t quite what you’d expect. A recent study by psychologists in Germany and Switzerland compared the listening habits of 185 adults against their scores on online intelligence tests. What they found was interesting: people who scored higher tended to gravitate toward songs with sad or emotionally complicated lyrics, rather than any particular style of music.
It’s not about genre at all.
What’s particularly interesting is that there was no indication that smarter people were listening to classical music specifically, or that people who preferred pop or rock scored any lower. It came down to the emotional depth of the lyrics, not the style of music wrapped around them.
That distinction is pretty important, since it overturns a fairly common assumption. Plenty of people casually associate classical music or jazz with higher intelligence, and pop or dance music with the opposite. The research suggests that link simply isn’t there once you actually measure it properly.
Music taste splits into four broad camps.
This new study builds on earlier work from 2003, when psychologists Peter Rentfrow and Samuel Gosling found that musical taste generally falls into four broad categories. There’s reflective and complex, covering things like classical, jazz, and blues. Intense and rebellious covers rock and metal. Upbeat and conventional includes pop and country. Finally, energetic and rhythmic covers hip-hop and dance.
Interestingly, which of these four groups someone fell into said far more about their personality than about their raw intelligence. Rentfrow and Gosling’s original research found that these categories mapped much more closely onto personality traits like openness, extroversion and emotional stability than onto anything resembling cognitive ability.
What your favourite category actually reveals
People drawn to reflective, complex music tend to score higher on openness to new experiences and general curiosity. Makes sense really, since curious people who want to understand the world tend to read more, travel more, and chase out enriching experiences generally, and that same appetite shapes their taste in music too.
And before anyone jumps to conclusions, liking country or dance music doesn’t make someone less clever. It’s more that people drawn to those genres tend to be motivated by different things, like the pure enjoyment of dancing, or the social buzz of being out with friends. Meanwhile, people who gravitate toward music with deep, melancholy lyrics tend to spend more time reflecting on things, or picking up new knowledge on their own. Neither pattern says anything about how sharp someone’s mind actually is, just what tends to draw their attention and how they prefer to spend their downtime.
Personality explains more than intelligence does.
Sit with that finding for a moment because it flips a common assumption on its head. We tend to treat music preference as some kind of intelligence signal, whether that’s snobbery around classical music or jokes about country fans. But the actual research keeps pointing toward personality traits, not cognitive ability, as the real driver behind what ends up on someone’s playlist.
That’s a far more useful way to think about music taste generally. Someone’s love of melancholy singer-songwriters says more about their tendency toward introspection than it does about their IQ, and someone’s love of upbeat pop says more about their sociability than anything measurable about their thinking.
You probably shouldn’t read too much into this.
That said, it’s worth taking all this with a decent pinch of salt. The 2026 study only looked at a fairly small group of German adults, and there were other factors, like age, that weren’t actually accounted for in the results. A sample that size makes it hard to generalise confidently to an entire population, let alone across different countries and cultures with very different musical traditions.
At the end of the day, intelligence itself is a tricky thing to pin down, shaped by all sorts of influences that go well beyond anything a quick online test can truly capture. And what music you actually enjoy has just as much to do with who you are and who you feel connected to, as it does with anything you could actually measure about how your brain works. Your playlist says plenty about you, just maybe not the thing you’d assume it does.
