<p>Music and language are both universal but diverse cultural traits shaped by cultural and biological evolution. However, there is disagreement on the relationships between music, language, and human history. Some argue that musical and linguistic similarities trace ancient migrations of people and their cultures, while others argue that they primarily reflect more recent contact between neighboring societies and local micro-evolution independent of population migration. Previous direct comparisons of musical, genetic, and linguistic diversity were restricted to small regional samples that gave conflicting results. Here, we analyze global patterns of diversity from newly public global databases containing over 5,000 traditional songs with standardized “Cantometric” codings and genomic profiles from over 4,000 individuals. We directly compare musical, linguistic, and genetic diversity for a subset of 152 matched societies (represented by 1,054 songs, genomic profiles of 1,719 individuals, and 152 languages). For both genes and music, differences within groups are greater than those between groups, but musical differences between groups are approximately three times greater than genetic differences. Song style and basic vocabulary both show relatively weak relationships with each other and with genetic distance and geographic proximity, in contrast to the much stronger relationships found between genes and geography. Thus, to our surprise, our findings suggest that music and language are weak proxies for human migrations.</p>