When I was in high school, my math teacher would play Mozart during tests, claiming it would help us. It would drive me crazy, and I doubt that my grades improved as a result of the distraction.
For what it's worth, I have a BMus in Piano Performance. I love music... but never as "background noise"!
This applies to programming for me because sometimes I need music that promotes creative thinking. Sometimes research. And sometimes, my favorite, hammering out the code because I have a rock solid idea on implementation and trajectory.
The wrong music in any one of those steps is actively harmful to my work. The right music promotes it. Silence on the other hand is weirdly deafening to me, usually. Sometimes I have to pause my music and talk myself through a problem, and sometimes in doing that I forget to turn the music back on. I frequently find myself 1 hour later, super tense in the shoulders and all around stiff. It's a weird and stressful state. The silence is too loud.