At 7.18 pm on 30 November 2006 three hundred people began to dance in a London railway station. Conga lines formed, some danced together while others were engrossed in their own dance steps on the concourse: not a single strain of music was heard by the bemused onlookers.

What took place was a flash mob, a happening organised via mobile phone text messages and email sent from person to person. In this case it was devoted to people dancing to different, individually chosen music that only they could hear on their personal MP3 players. In this brief moment many of the themes of this chapter are encapsulated: the centrality of listening to recordings in our modern relationship to music; how technological innovations have encouraged this; the increasing atomisation of the musical experience coupled, paradoxically, with a yearning for (musical) community; and, most of all, the idea that listening is far from being a passive, receive-only mode of interacting with music. In what follows we provide a sketch of how listening became institutionalised as the prevalent and normative mode of musical appreciation in industrialised locations; how the activity of listening has been variously configured over time and place (in interaction with technology); and how listening needs to be theorised as a form of social practice, even when it takes place in solitude. We set these themes in the context of what listening, as a social activity, has enabled listeners to do, and we examine the symbiosis between recorded music, related industries and the listener.