I haven't seen that in The Netherlands, where I studied. But I did meet some fellow guitar players during my degree :)

Music and programming have a couple of things in common. The most important thing being: the act of creating something. Anyone who's a creator at heart will be interested by many endeavours that allow you to create. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if there's also a disproportionate amount of woodworkers among software engineers (as opposed to among laywers, for example).

The thing is, not every programmer is a programmer because he/she wants to create. There are other aspects to programming that might be interesting to some.

Your point about the commonality is "the act of creating something" is really touching. I really value the character to being "brave" to get creative, and also knowing that you can do/make/change things to the way you want / make it better.

I can see how it relates to various "creation" activities like cooking, painting, electronics/arduino,film-making, or even open-discussion/forum in general (creating community through participation).

Most common non-STEM degree maybe. I'm sure there are a lot more EE/ physics/ math grads working as programmers than music grads.

One of the more surprising combos at university was Physics and Music. That was the degree, and the numbers were similar to those doing Computational Physics.

Imperial College actually used to offer a BSc Physics and Music Performance course[1] (it was suspended recently). This is notable because dual majors, even between similar/adjacent academic fields, are rare for UK undergraduate degrees.

[1] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/study/ug/courses/physics-departme...

If you don't purely do piano and do synthesizers, and write music with DAWs, there's even more crossover. You "program" drums/synths. That's literally what they call it, even though it's conceptually somewhat different. I got into it only to realize it's very similar to "work".