I think my "moment" with this passiveness/ubiquity thing was the day when I noticed music was "on" in every store in the mall too, audible as you walked past, s

I think my "moment" with this passiveness/ubiquity thing was the day when I noticed music was "on" in every store in the mall too, audible as you walked past, serving as an advertisement of sorts, maybe conveying something (the merchants hoped) about what their business was about. And if you walked in the store, of course it would become the soundtrack, influencing your emotions for a perfectly curated retail consumption experience! That's the day I realized music had become plentiful and cheap, in both the Econ 101 sense and others. It was also the epitome of listener passivity, as the customers didn't choose to have music on at all, didn't choose which music was on, and might even have had their buying influenced by it. (Though there's a counter-argument to the last bit, that anyone who didn't like the music might just self-select outta there.) Anyway it didn't make me go back to vinyl... it just made me buy a nicer and more impenetrable pair of headphones. And it made me get the hell out of the music biz.