It's funny - we've been looking for this data for a while!
From our own personal experiences and just chatting with other people, we've always reckoned that for knowledge workers, a little bit of background music is good for productivity. And to build on that, we believed that instrumental music was better than songs with lyrics as the words often got in the way of what we were trying to achieve.
This study from Taiwan in 2012 actually shows some data to back that theory up!
Over 100 participants in their early twenties were given concentration and attention testing within different audio environments. Background music with lyrics had a significant negative effect on performance.
So, there you go kids - if you're a knowledge worker then instrumental music's the way to go - and hey - you might want t try some of ours ;-)
Image Credit: no kidding by andrea joseph - Flickr