I don't listen to music with words. My brain's language processing unit goes into action, and disrupts my ability to code.
Instrumentals, electronic music, or classical music are fine.
Instrumentals, electronic music, or classical music are fine.
The car's on fire, there's no driver at the wheel
and the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides.
On web app tests I normally find plaid or other ambient electronica works better for me.
For coding I find that swing, jazz and blues works best. I've been listening to a lot of cab Calloway of late which is mostly instrumental or scat focused. If theres too much by way of lyrics or if it's too catchy it tends to disrupt my concentration though.
What I've found to deal with this is 2 of SomaFM's channels: Drone Zone and Space Station Soma
Turn those up on some noise-cancelling headphones and lock out everything else. Good times.
EDIT: formatting
People talk to me about the lyrics to songs I know and I have no idea what they're on about. I can listen to, and even sing, songs whose lyrics I've never verbally parsed. So I get on great with songs that sound good but have idiotic or nonsensical lyrics (Phoenix or The Smashing Pumpkins, for example) because I don't interpret them anyway. I have to listen deliberately and with full attention to "get it."
Despite that, I can't really program while listening to songs with lyrics. Somewhere in my brain a thread is running parsing the lyrics and stealing cycles.
However, if I'm browsing/wasting time online/working out at the gym/running, I definitely prefer stuff like hiphop to keep me entertained. I think this is because these are more passive tasks.
In general, I prefer silence when concentrating.