Sounds like a good deal

From Stuff

“According to a new study titled, Music Makes it Home, couples who listen to music together saw a huge spike in their sex lives.”

This is a genuine experimental study, but it’s for marketing. Neither the design nor the reporting are done they way they would be if the aim was to find things out.

In addition to a survey of 30,000 people, which just tells you about opinions, Stuff says Sonos did an experiment with 30 families:

Each family was given a Sonos sound system and Apple Music subscription and monitored for two weeks. In the first week, families were supposed to go about their lives as usual. But in the second week, they were to listen to the music.

Sonos says

The first week,participants were instructed not to listen to music out loud. The second week,participants were encouraged to listen to music out loud as much as they wanted.

That’s a big difference.

The reporting, both from Sonos and from Stuff, mixes results from the 30,000-person survey in with the experiment results.  For example, the headline statistic in the Stuff story, 67% more sex, is from the survey, even though the phrasing “saw a huge spike in their sex lives” makes it sound like a change seen in the experiment. The experimental study found 37% more ‘active time in the bedroom’.

Overall, the differences seen in the experimental study still look pretty impressive, but there are two further points to consider.  First, the participants knew exactly what was going on and why, and had been given lots of expensive electronics.  It’s not unreasonable to think this might bias the results.

Second, we don’t have complete results, just the summaries that Sonos has provided — it wouldn’t be surprising if they had highlighted the best bits. In fact, the neuroscientist involved with the study admits in the story that negative results probably wouldn’t have been published.