I listed what genres I liked the best just to show that most people who do care about music would be ‘omg she likes Top 40 radio? Burn the witch!’ whereas I really don’t care.
Maybe I am talking at cross purposes. I have known people who think they are clever for"not liking music". They say they don’t listen to any music at all. I think that is like saying “I don’t like food” or “I don’t like thinking”. I don’t have any standards about what music people DO like, its just hard to have any regard for people who don’t like anything musical at all.
Most people in this thread seem to like music, they just don’t get into all the detail and I think that is a fine thing.
Because we read the OP instead of assuming?
Many of these statements about “listening to music” don’t represent “liking,” to my understanding.
Hearing music in modern society may be unavoidable, and having-music-on may become a habit in some settings (while working or driving, for example), but being exposed to music and not objecting isn’t at all the same as active interest and appreciation.
I’d say “not liking music” is more like “not liking movies” or “not liking books.” I understand this is possible, but it is an alien sensation. Thus I’m slightly fascinated, which is why I’m reading this thread. (Music is important to me.)
Not a music person, nor is the wife. We’ve never bothered to get a proper stereo. Just have this sort of Sony boombox that gathers dust, along with the cassette tapes and CDs accumulated over the years. Always just listen to the radio or MTV (which is out of Taiwan via our building’s satellite dish but still plays a lot of Western stuff). Still, there are certain songs and groups that take me right back to my youth, but I only hear them by chance, as I never go out of my way to listen to them.
I enjoy music quite a lot. I love, love, love my iPhone for carrying lots of music and I listen to it when working out, travelling, or whatever.
But I’m certainly not as big a fan as I thought I was.
I recently became single again, as I’ve mentioned in other threads, and looked at some online personal ads. I’m eternally surprised at the number of women in their 30s who list, in exhaustive detail, the specific musical acts they’re into. I just don’t know how you find the time, as a working, grownup person, to be into half the new acts that come down the pike. Nor, to be honest, do I really give a shit what music someone else listens to. But it’s apparently very important to other people.
So I like music, but, evidently, not nearly as much as others do.
I’m not a music person at all. I tried when I was younger, but I eventually realized that (A) my taste is laughably unsophisticated, and (B) it really doesn’t bother me at all to go for months without listening to any.
I was raised in a house that really only had classical music playing. I still don’t mind classical - it’s not like I raised up in rebellion against it - but most of it leaves me bored, as indeed, does most music of any genre. In high school, I played the cello at my mom’s insistence. Probably the most powerful musical moments of my life came from playing in an orchestra. That truly was a neat feeling, and occasionally I’ll listen to stuff I used to play to remember it.
Other than that, in high school I tried listening to the radio, and buying CDs and whatnot just to fit in with what I thought I “should” be doing. The vast majority of the music I own now comes from that period. There have been a few things here and there that I enjoyed, but as I grew, I discovered that I hate digging through hours and hours of stuff I don’t care about to find the occasional nugget, and I’d much rather spend my time listening to speech.
Nowadays, I listen almost exclusively to BBC Radio shows, or audio books, or things of that nature. I don’t think I own a single piece of music that was created in the 2000s. Music in public doesn’t bother me - I just tune it out. I can’t remember the last time I heard a song and thought, “Oooh, wow. That was great. I must get that.”
Much like sports and politics, the sheer enthusiasm I’ve seen around me for music convinced me for many years that I was somehow fundamentally missing out on something great, but I no longer believe that. My attitude now is that I’m fine without it, and if anyone doesn’t like that, well, screw 'em.
I AM a music person, but I used to feel much like a lot of the other people seem to describe themselves in this thread. My brothers, one older and one younger, were very much into music at a much younger age than I was, and even having taken piano lessons when I was younger, I remember being in middle school and much of high school seeing how much so many other kids were into music and, other than a couple random CDs and my own musings on the piano, I felt sort of out of it.
As it turned out, the reason I wasn’t a music person was largely because the music that I was exposed to just wasn’t my music. Once I finally tripped upon the right bands and got exposed to the right genres, I finally “got” it, and I dove in head first. So, perhaps for some of you self-described non-music people, you’ve found stuff that you kind of like, but haven’t really tripped upon what really speaks to you.
That all said, I still think it’s actually quite common. Music is just another form of art, like the visual arts, like literature, like film, like dancing, like photography, what makes music unique among these is that it’s ridiculously accessible because it’s a purely audial medium and so it’s everywhere, so there’s some sort of implication that everyone “should” be into it. How many other mediums of art can be enjoyed while at work or driving or working out, not to mention actually listening to an album or going to a concert?
From my perspective, just like I can enjoy a good photograph, yet I know some who take no less than a hundred shots a week just walking around, and know all about the technology and techniques; that’s no different than someone being able to enjoy a good song, and me being able recognize various techniques or discuss music theory, or discuss a dozen different bands that have a similar sound.
So, I guess, even as someone who is obsessed with music, it doesn’t seem weird to me when I meet people that aren’t.
I love music, and searching out new stuff is my chief hobby, but I am not obsessive about it to the point where I can pigeonhole myself into some five year era, and don’t have strongly negative reactions against what I dislike. Threads like those leave me about as bemused as anyone who isn’t into music.
I listened to music in my teen years, and after that, my interest took a nose dive. I will occasionally listen to the radio in the car if I don’t have a current audiobook.
Oddly, I am interested in knowing the artists of songs (that is, songs up until the year 1989). It’s kind of a trivia game that I play with myself. I also pay close attention to lyrics, and give some thought as to the actual meaning of songs, or how the song was regarded at the time it was popular. I have opinions about music too. 
However, I own an iTouch without any music on it at all, and although I still have a lot of my teenage cassette collection, it’s rare that I listen to it. Once I own a song, it loses a lot of its luster for some reason.
My husband is pretty disinterested. He doesn’t have a particularly good ear for music, has trouble remembering lyrics, owns maybe a dozen CDs and has a few mp3s, and can happily go weeks without hearing any music at all, as far as I can tell. I am sort-of interested; I have probably about a hundred CDs, and three days worth of mp3s (many ripped from the CDs), have a couple of favorite artists, can sing basic harmony, and remember lyrics well. That said, I go through phases where I want to hear lots of music, and phases where I don’t really need it, and have only been to a handful of concerts in my life.
My husband is a musician and therefor loves music. He follows many bands and obscure musicians that have very tiny followings because they are friends of his. He can play a song on the guitar, getting most of the lyrics right after hearing it once or twice. if he hears a new song on the radio he can correctly identify the artist without having heard an intro by the DJ.
Me? I can’t tell you who sings what. I rarely turn on the radio unless I’m in a car. The car radio is because I find the music more pleasant than road noise (Dodges are noisy!) If I am trying to get stuff done around the house I listen to the local NPR station play classical. I love my husband’s music and I do think he’s talented. To me the important part of his songs are the lyrics and I pay attention to those more than the music. I can’t remember the last time I purposely put one of his CDs on a stereo.
I probably should have been more clear- I like music fine; it’s just not something I have the least bit of passion about. There have been a few CDs over time that I realized that I liked more than 4 songs off of, so I bought the CD.
OTOH, over the years I’ve known a dozen people who had EVERYTHING that a particular band had released, including stuff from all over the world. In the days pre-internet, no less. They’re the ones with the t-shirts, posters, bumper stickers, etc…
I’ve also known people who literally have hundreds of CDs. Not cheeseball mix cds of random songs they like, but hundreds of commercially produced albums. Even with Columbia House, they likely sunk hundreds if not thousands of dollars into their collections.
That’s what I’d consider passion about music- people for who it’s a major interest and/or something that shapes their lives.
That was Angel of Doubt, not me. Maybe you should turn the volume down on your iPod, it’s damaging your hearing.
I wouldn’t say the first people “don’t like music”, I would say they “dislike music.” It’s similar to the difference between “I don’t watch TV” and “I can’t stand TV,” in that one is neutral and the other is negative. I don’t like potatoes (that is, if there is about anything else available, I’ll take the anything else) but dislike cauliflower (that is, it makes potatoes look like the acme of pleasure).
And the OP was asking about people who are not as passionate about music as some of the people in Cafe Society or in our lives are. I do listen to music, but my library makes the self-appointed musicophiles (curiously enough, not the real musicians) break into hives.
Although I’m a (admittedly amateur) musician, amongst musicians, I would probably qualify as not being a music person. It’s not that I don’t like music, it’s that I am so utterly unfamiliar with anything other than the actual music itself, and what I’ve learned from playing it. I generally don’t know the name of a song, who sang it, nor anything about the band. If I do know, it’s usually because I noticed something interesting that happened in a piece, or somebody around me has talked about it too much and I learned it through osmosis.
I’m also a bigger fan of, say, talk show bands that do a lot of different styles. And, as a musician, I have little desire to get really good at one particular style. I’d rather have a lot of styles, with maybe a few that I’m better at, then one style that is amazing. Yet, at the same time, I do love the praise, even when I don’t think I deserve it.
I honestly don’t know if that last paragraph was more of a tangent or not.
I think the issue, don’t ask, is that you’re defining “not a music person” as “actively dislikes music” whereas the rest of us are defining it as “not especially interested in music.” It’s a big, big difference. You can like something just fine without wanting to seek it out or being interested in the ins and outs of it.
My husband, for example, likes quilts and horses well enough. He admires nice ones with me, offers opinions/suggestions on my work when solicited, and will attend the occasional related event with me and have a reasonably good time. But once he’s had enough time to say, “Oh that’s a pretty one,” or “I like this one better than that one,” he’s generally worn out his interest in the subject and is ready to dismiss the whole thing from his mind, Derby parties and occasional “thought you’d want to see this” emails to me aside. If you asked him to define his feelings on either subject, he wouldn’t say he doesn’t like them because that would be untrue. No, he’d say that he’s not a quilt or horse person.
Sorry, I didn’t realize I’d violated the rules of the thread. Even if I did find better music than what I have, (and it would only be for working out, as I implied), I don’t care about particular bands, albums,or the minutiae of musician’s lives. Heck, there’s a grand total of 7 songs on said iPod.
I find it hard to say what music defines me, but for the opposite reason of the OP. There’s just too much that I like, and most of it is either older or newer than what my age cohort liked back in the day.
There aren’t a lot of people that actively dislike all music, I imagine. I DO dislike the fact that there is always music (mostly of a type I don’t like listening to) playing wherever I go. Even music I don’t dislike is too noisy and very distracting in a lot of situations. I like peace and quiet, and I find it hard to concentrate if I don’t get it.
I don’t like movies either. And people do look at me like an alien if I tell them this, heh.
That’s not to say that I haven’t watched movies before that I enjoy (if I’m ever in the mood to veg out in front of the tube I put on the Turner Classic Movie channel, I like movies from the 30s-60s much more than more modern fare), but it’s just not a form of entertainment that usually appeals to me much, or can hold my interest very well. Same for music.