Hell is Other People's Music
In the Wired article "Hell is Other People's Music", Momus describes the problem of being forced to listen to music other people love:
Thanks
to the combined influence of technology and marketing, songs are being
leveraged into every "blank" bit of space. ... Just as music
needs a backdrop of silence to signify, we need music-free
stretches to make music meaningful.
With tongue in cheek he suggests that technology can provide the answer:I personally dream of song-canceling technology; technology that can cancel whole singers, like Jack Johnson, or whole genres, like emo rock.
Finally, someone has thought up a use for all of those Artist Identification and Genre Classification
systems that MIR researchers have been working on for the last few
years. Imagine a little device that detects your set of
least favored music and outputs a cancelling signal like those noise
cancelling headphones can do ... no more Pina Colada song for me.