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Music streaming, structured by an expanding network of social interdependencies (e.g. musicians, sound engineers, computer scientists and distributors) has made it easier to consume music in a wider number of social and private spaces and to a greater degree. This paper examines the emotional experience of contemporary music consumption by drawing from an Eliasian perspective, specifically Elias and Dunning’s sociology of leisure. We explore the relationship between work, spare time and leisure spaces, rather than examining specific spaces in isolation. We argue that music is used to demarcate, transition between, and blur space. Music plays an important role in facilitating the rhythm of routine, helping individuals to adjust to the demands of different spaces (based on varying intensities and immediacies of social pressures) and manage mood. The key characteristics of leisure that Elias and Dunning identify (motility, sociability and mimetic tension) are explored across the spectrum of time and space.

The intensification of friendship networks among independent singles is considered ‘the pleasure offered by the single life’ and the sociability, rather thandomesticity, of this life stage is often emphasised. This paper reports oninterviews with independent singles from affluent areas which suggested thataccompanying this cultural norm of sociability was the relentless onus of temporal organisation required for interpersonal synchronisation with friends. While not retracting their enjoyment of the single life, respondents expressed a distinct and distinctive sense of risk or vulnerability of spending too much time alone, particularly at the weekend. It is argued that, on the one hand, the relativeabsence of paid work at the weekend removes the structures that constrain theparticipation in and the temporal location of joint leisure practices during theweek. On the other hand, the absence of employment structuring people’s dayincreases unpredictability about other people’s whereabouts, whenabouts andtheir availability for shared practices. In response to this dilemma – that is, theweekend as the primary site for sociability met with uncertainty of others’ availability – independent singles responded in a number of ways to secure temporal arrangements with others, safeguarding themselves against the ‘built-in hazards’ of being single and finding themselves home alone at the weekend.