In which situation do you most commonly listen to music?

have completely stopped listening to music without a commute. whoops.

Sitting around my apartment dicking around on my phone. Or riding my bike, via a speaker clipped to a messenger bag.

I miss living in LA for this, got a lot of good music listening done in the car.

in conclusion, i think the hysterical need to pump music into all public spaces is harmful

x1000

although don't underestimate the harmfulness of one's own (okay, my) tendency to have some music going all the time ... always playing, never heard.

Cafés without music are godsends (or they were pre-Covid-19) and pop pollution is the blight’s ever-renewed vanguard. budo, if you’re curious, Pascal Quignard’s The Hatred of Music speaks directly to your concerns.

I think the car is really the perfect place to listen to music, since you can concentrate on it but you're not just doing *nothing*. I can't just sit down and listen to music, I have to be reading or doing something. but if I'm working or doing too much it just washes over me. so now blasting records while I'm playing online poker is the ideal situation.

Listening to podcasts and webinars too much to listen to music more so what's on the earphones as I'm walking or on the bus these days is probably a podcast.

over the last year or two I started noticing how much podcasts had replaced music-listening in my life and i didnt feel too great about it. Every morning my feed is updated with 12+hours of podcast content, more than I can listen to in one day, and I started noticing that I was pressuring myself to listen to it all and 'stay caught up', despite the fact that its an unending stream of new daily content with a lot of built-in redundancy (news shows talking about the same news events, etc). I had to kind of re-train myself to listen to music at home instead of reflexively hitting play on the next podcast, and am glad I did - music is better than podcasts.

Have also been rediscovering the pleasures of sitting down and just listening to a record on headphones without doing anything else, which I've barely done since I was a teenager (when I used to do it a LOT and had some of my most enjoyable listening experiences.) Moving into a house in a couple weeks and I'm really looking forward to getting a couch next to the record player and being able to lie back and do some deep focused listening on the regular.

I actually miss listening to music with friends while drinking.

I definitely don’t miss a couple of them who got way too drunk for someone over 30 and wanted to take control of the music, which almost always resulted in a selection of crap music from the 90s and early 00s getting skipped sometimes even before the chorus starts.

i relate so hard to all of that post

thanks pom and NJS for the recommendations

I think about this quite a lot but I haven't been around to hear radios much recently.

When searching for jobs, factoring in whether I'll be around a radio is a serious consideration, it can be really depressing and I don't get how most people seem to cope fine with it or don't care.

When I was at college people turned on the radio automatically and I heard some songs 3 or 4 times a day and I didn't have the guts to ask to change the station or turn it off. I must have heard that Junior Senior hit song 1387 times over a couple of years.

And I remember getting work experience at an artists studio and it seemed to be a revelation to them that they didn't have to listen to the singles chart stuff, they normally just turned it on and never thought to getting something they liked.

I think maybe the unspoken reason that shops always have music is to mask the sounds of farts. Because most of the times I can remember shops not having their usual radio playing, I also remember hearing farts.

I think people's family/friends also seems to expose people to a lot of unwanted television and movies. Don't know how many times I've heard "why do you watch that shit if you hate it so much?" being answered with "because of my family".

Also neighbors playing music or television too loud.

I would love harder noise regulations. Isn't germany supposed to be quite good for this?

Music was invented to mask the sound of farts

I think maybe the unspoken reason that shops always have music is to mask the sounds of farts. Because most of the times I can remember shops not having their usual radio playing, I also remember hearing farts.

i will never be able to shop the grocery store the same ever again. thanks, man.

I vaguely recall hearing about shops having this as one of there reasons but I've mostly heard that shoppers stay longer and buy more with music on.

I thought search engine would yield something about hearing farts in shops but nope.

i was in the dentist's chair waiting for the dentist yesterday and they had "pearl jam radio" streaming quietly over the speakers.

they played the titular pearl jam, a new song i think, pretty mellow and acoustic, i was thinking about how much i enjoyed the song and it's weird but still rock-derived key changes and eddie vedder's manic warble. what could they possibly play next, i wondered, probably something i'll hate.

but then came "the weight" by the band and be still my heart, i found myself on the verge of tears as that little resolution of the chorus appeared with all the voices coming in on different pitches in staggered fashion. here i am contemplating the profound loneliness one bears through life as i'm waiting for a dental checkup.

next up is ... "it's my life" by talk talk. one of the most euphoric pop songs imaginable. sheer transcendence.

such a beautiful journey in the 10 minutes before an old man started fidgeting around in my mouth.

Muzak is in trouble. Since 1934, the popular company has been providing retailers with musical strategies to boost worker productivity, encourage consumerism, and manipulate mood in a brick-and-mortar experience. Muzak was purchased in 2011 by Austin-based Mood Media, which also specializes in the manipulative power of carefully curated scents, decor, and social media, in the hopes of the parent company cornering the in-store music market.

But Mood Media — which also owns Trusonic, Somerset, DMX, BIS Group, Technomedia, and South Central A\V in addition to Muzak — is now filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy [...]

The company owes much of its financial struggles to the COVID-19 lockdown, as many citizens continue to shelter in place and a wide variety of businesses remain either closed or partially open. Mood Music — which acknowledged the virus’s “widespread devastation” on consumer habits and a reorganization of priorities at its retail clients — has told investors that it will continue operate throughout “the contemplated court-supervised process with a primary focus on the health and safety of its employees, independent affiliates and clients.” Mood provides in-store music marketing (a.k.a. “elevator music”) for clients like malls, restaurants, and dental offices, in addition to other products like digital signage and scents.

https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/retail-music-mood-media-muzak-bankruptcy-1027015/

spotify should get in on the remains of the carcass

i've noticed myself responding more strongly to piped-in music as i get older. either it's completely unbearable to the point where i have to leave (sprouts grocery store) or it transports me / turns me into an emotional mess.

I completely fell apart in Daiso once because “something just like this” played on the store pa

(By Coldplay)