Los Angeles  - A new study has found that kids who listen to music with raunchy lyrics are more likely to engage in sexual activity than kids who don't.

The study, to be published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, did not find a causal link between crude music and teen sex but indicated that "people who are exposed to certain messages in music are more likely to copy or emulate what they hear," said study author Dr Brian Primack in a statement.

"There does seem to be a strong association between sexual experience and music with degrading lyrics, and yet the same relationship does not hold with non-degrading lyrics in other sexually explicit songs," said Primack.

The research in 2006-07 asked 711 ninth-grade students around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, about their sexuality activity and the songs they liked to listen to. The study then determined how many of the 279 most popular songs in the study featured degrading lyrics that referred to sex "based only on physical characteristics" and included a "power differential" instead of being mutually consensual.

The researchers found that youths who listened most to "degrading" songs were more than twice as likely to have had intercourse as other kids in the study. (dpa)