Edison invented the recorded cylinder in 1877. Mediated musics, sounds schizophonically split from their sources (Schafer 1977:90), have been with us for over a century. Phonograph records have been commercially available since 1897. Radio and records have been an extremely powerful combination in disseminating music to people since the 1920s. Wire recordings, reel tape recordings and, currently, cassette tapes have transformed listening habits and musical cultures throughout the world. Recordings may have been the single most important factor in getting this discipline of ethnomusicology started, freezing musical processes as objects of study, a precondition and a continuing, if largely taken for granted, frame of reference. Studies examining human interaction with all the mediated music processes, however, are surprisingly few and far between. How do people actually use all this machinery and mediated music? How do people use their record and tape collections? What social interactions occur around them? What exchanges of goods, services, and information? Americans spend about a quarter of their waking hours interacting with TV sets and I've never been able to find a good article about that process! Do people talk to each other very little or a lot while watching? Does this vary much with ethnicity and social class? Why is the sound usually off when TV is on at local taverns? These kinds of questions, hundreds of them, about media and humanity in the concrete quotidian, do not seem to get asked very often and are studied even less. There is much media theory to read and a number of communication departments exist at universities. There are plenty of product-related reports and elaborate ratings systems to determine the number and kinds of listeners or viewers for any given station at any given moment. But the quality, the nature of people's listening and viewing, the social life in which media reception is embedded, does not receive much attention. Why? I think in capitalist America we just assume isolation, individualism, passivity, mindless consumption, a lot of inert little black boxes out there into which mediated stimuli are pumped. It is assumed that the only responses from the little boxes that matter can be measured by sales