havocthecat:

stackcats:

the-scottish-costume-guy:

I’ve seen multiple people genuinely asking whats wrong with playing their music on a speaker/their phone in public rather than through headphones. While it baffles me that you can’t reason it out I’m taking it in good faith that you genuinely don’t know - so here’s a list of reasons you shouldn’t:

- It sounds bad. It doesnt matter if people like the song, you might be close enough to your phone speaker for it to sound largely as intended, but everyone else is getting a distorted mess. 

- Unwanted noise is extra stimulation in the already overpowering public space. Yes this is particularly bad for neurodivergent people but I actually want to acknowledge that this effects Everyone. Everyone has a stimulation threshold and unwanted music easily pushes people closer to it.

- Its distracting/disruptive. People want to focus on their own conversations, listen to their own music through their earbuds, or just be alone with their thoughts. Your music is intruding. 

- Differing taste. This one is less significant but people around you just dont always like the same music you do. In extreme cases they might actively hate a song you’re playing. 

- People have the right to as close to silence as they can get. If they’re in a shop playing obnoxious music they can leave, they can change the radio in their car, they can skip the song on their playlist. They have no control over what you are putting on and in bus situations they can’t get away from you. 

- Any other number of reasons; Maybe your music is offensive, maybe its uncensored and there are children about, maybe someone just got horrible news and your perky feelgood song feels like salt in the wound, maybe someone’s sick or hungover or in pain and your music feels like a drill to the skull. 

You might think your music is good, it might make you smile after a hard day. Nobody is saying dont listen at all, just put in earphones. To everyone around you its the equivilent of a drunk guy singing loudly and off key at the back of the bus. Maybe it makes some people smile to think he’s having a good time, maybe some people are scared his lack of boundaries will mean he could act out, maybe some people wish he would just shut up. 

you are controlling an aspect of a public space which affects everyone in that space. That’s the jist of it. By playing music in public, you’re saying “my desired sound and its volume are all that matters, and nobody else’s”. That’s why quiet, beyond a reasonable speaking volume, should be the default in public. If quietness is unsettling to you, you can fix it by listening to something through earbuds without affecting anyone else, but if too much/the wrong kind of noise is unsettling to others, it’s much harder for them to block it out.

Shared spaces should be kept at conditions tolerable to everyone, where reasonable. That’s almost the definition of a shared space. If you dominate that space in some way, eg by playing music out loud, you are making it your space. You are making it unwelcoming for others. That is rude and anti-social behavior.

it’s the last one, really. just the last one.