No, I think you're probably right. I use crappy cheap headphones and every now and then I am reminded how much I miss of the music I love.

I don't disagree, but on the other hand I now listen to much more music both in terms of volume and diversity than I did before mp3s/iPods.

Uh, I mean volume as in quantity, not loudness, if that wasn't obvious.

I've never been a fan of headphones or having music pumped directly into holes in my head. I like being surrounded by music. And I know people with great music set ups but they do happen to be involved in music somehow and/or older.
I pretty much do not use ipods unless they are connected to speakers and don't run around wearing one.
I wonder at how much early hearing loss we will end up having.

I only have one friend who ever outlaid good money on a speaker set up. The rest of us trundled along with what we could afford.

We did/do sit around listening to music at his place. At our place it's run through the Xbox and our TV so it isn't great quality - or it's in the kitchen on my 1998 bought mini-hifi. It's better quality but I can only listen to CDs and most of our collection is digital. We did go and buy a bunch of blanks to burn CDs again (which feels so retro now). When we have a gathering we do add music usually, but I get thingy with competing noises and with a three year old I often have to turn the music off so I don't go crazy.

While out I often have my headphones on - it is about the only time I get to listen properly to music and it's a decent enough signifier to be left alone as well. I like listening to music in the car too but currently most of my trips are with the kid so it's a little curtailed. When I was commuting it was only CDs so it was all from our physical music heyday of the late 90s early 00s.

I've never been able to tolerate sounds delivered directly to my ears via headphones. So I cannot comment on the ipod syndrome.

What I love about music listening nowadays is the huge variety of radio stations I can find from all over the world. I no longer have to endure the local set playlist stations. I totally love the opportunity to listen to jazz from anywhere or the ability to find or create a station on pandora.

You're likely right, but personally, I have a headphone to RCA cord that works pretty well running through my mid-90's tuner and mid 70's (older than me) wood cased JBL speakers.

Generally, the only time that I listen to recorded music not through headphones these days is when I'm driving. I was doing some work in the garage with a friend of mine a few weeks ago so I hooked up my phone to a radio that I keep in the garage and it was cool to share some music with someone else for a change. Got him to listen to the Alabama Shakes album, which loved.

Even during my heaviest pot smoking days I rarely listened to music with other people. Music is for my alone time.

well, I think it depends. we certainly listen to a LOT more music, styles, genres and just quantity now that we a) have a fantastic audio setup and b) have merged our music libraries onto one media drive and c) use things like Pandora and iTunes radio and Genius mixes. We hard wired a good set of speakers into the walls when we did our remodel last spring and added a remote set in the garage on a satellite airplay receiver. So now our house is filled with music pretty much at whim. In fact I'm listening to and tweaking a new Pandora mix based on a Colorado techno group I'd not have discovered would it not have been for the tendency of all our friends to run these sorts of airplay / streaming mixes at every single house party / event we go to.

most of the really good music I've gotten recently has been because it was either playing in the hipster cafe I frequent (I use SoundHound on my iPhone to capture / make note of music I like) or on somebody's sound system when I was at their place, or was discovered via Pandora or just discussing it with friends and they turn on their system and go "you gotta hear these guys". It's actually very much like what I remember of my parents in the seventies, minus the various annoyances related to vinyl, and of course you can go much, much, much deeper, broader and further with digital setups and streaming services, because if you don't like what's playing or you're interested in hearing more of the artist, you just switch the genre / change the channel or find the rest of their works plus ten other folks doing similar things via Pandora or Spotify or iTunes.

and then there's just the physical component. mr. lfr and I have over 100GB shared music, representing hundreds and hundreds of albums, all on a hard drive the size of a deck of cards. Were we to keep that collection on CDs or vinyl I'd imagine it would take up an entire room in our house.

I miss casual jamming with people.

I see your point, but I do think that for me, it's not having that effect.

I still buy lots of stuff on vinyl (that Alabama Shakes record sounds GREAT on vinyl, through good speakers, and a solid amp. So does Tallest Man on Earth. Don't even get me started on how good the live Sam Cooke album (the one from Miami, in 1963) sounds) and while I generally do this solo, I do share sometimes.

I also drive a car with a decent sound system, which I find allows me to hear parts of a recording that I had missed in other listening environments. I'm a guy who loves a good highway drive, and music is a BIG part of that. I often save records to REALLY delve into, on the highway. While I really enjoy a road trip with friends, lots of times, they cramp my listening time!

And, lastly, I bought some pretty good headphones for work. Big fuck-off cans that seem to sort of hold the world at bay at times. They sound pretty good too.

So, while I DO think that yeah, mp3 players likely result in lots of music being listened to via shitty headphones (or my fave - the iphone in the wine glass) there are still some of us listening to music at a decent quality, and also, I think, more people listening in general. That can't be all bad.

The only thing that's changed for me is that I rarely listen to one album all the way through anymore and I do sometimes kind of miss that. My iPod lives in my kitchen on a set of decent but not spectacular speakers - I hate headphones, always have, never use them - and it's pretty much permanently on shuffle. I could of course use it the way I used to use my record player (and my cassette deck and my groovy high tech 5 CD changer that was twice the size of the turntable) but navigating an ipod is an exercise in frustration for me. I don't have the time or the thumb power to endlessly slide up and down that stupid circle. Still, I love the ipod, I love shuffle, I love being able to put all my music in one place and in one format and then hear it randomly. And there is still always music playing in my house.

It's certainly made listening to music while mowing the lawn easier.

Otherwise, I've found that my interest in listening to music in general to have greatly diminished. Whether that's the iPod's fault, I really can't say. I know that I find rummaging through the iTunes store or Amazon for new music to be really tedious and uninvolving in a way that rummaging through a record/cd bin never was.

I was far more involved in music from through the mid-late-90's, and spent many happy hours perched within the sweet-spot between my JBLs. Today, though, I rarely take the time to do any actual listening, especially with new music.

Like, people never sit around in a living room and savor tunes being played on a good stereo through good speakers anymore.

No... *you and your friends* don't sit around in a living room and yadda yadda.

People think I'm a Luddite, but I still enjoy music.

I think you're right. Maybe it's because music is so much more accessible now? When I was a teenager, music was expensive to buy, impossible to copy (unless you had one of those new-fangled cassette tape things) and so it was more valuable somehow. I remember sitting in a friend's living room in the middle of four huge speakers attached to a quadraphonic set-up that probably cost as much as a modern car, listening to Pink Floyd at ridiculous volumes. I remember getting together at parties where people would bring their records (yes, real vinyl ones) to share. Now, music is such an easy thing to access that having the latest release the day it's released is as unremarkable as having a collection of thousands of songs to choose from. The affordability of music has dramatically decreased its value, I think. Well, that and most new music is shit ;-)

I mostly listen to music on headphones these days, but only because my commute is usually the only time when I can just sit and listen without being interrupted. It's not the same, though - my favourite way to listen to music is to have it blaring from a set of speakers big enough that I can feel the vibrations in my chest. Until I changed jobs recently, I had a work car with a decent sound system and I loved to turn the volume way up and open the windows on a summer afternoon and let it rip. Apart from sitting on the floor in the middle of a stack of speakers a foot away from you, driving is the bestest way to listen to music.