The power of music to influence mood, create scenes, routines and occasions is widely recognised and this is reflected in a strand of social theory from Plato to Adorno that portrays music as an influence on character, social structure and action. There have, however, been few attempts to specify this power empirically and to provide theoretically grounded accounts of music's structuring properties in everyday experience. Music in Everyday Life uses a series of ethnographic studies - an aerobics class, karaoke evenings, music therapy sessions and the use of background music in the retail sector - as well as in-depth interviews to show how music is a constitutive feature of human agency. Drawing together concepts from psychology, sociology and socio-linguistics it develops a theory of music's active role in the construction of personal and social life and highlights the aesthetic dimension of social order and organisation in late modern societies.

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Through its embrace of the “cultural turn” and the “practice turn” in cultural sociology, recent work in the subfield of arts sociology has helped to advance our understanding of the role of culture in social life through its focus on arts-in-action. Empirically, this focus grew out of earlier work in the production and consumption of the arts, while, theoretically, it resonates with traditions within ethnomethodology, cognitive sociology, and the sociology of science and technology. The authors describe how new work in arts sociology unearths and develops our understanding of aesthetic consciousness, the tacit and often embodied bases of action, cognition, and engagement with cultural forms. This recent emphasis on materials and actions in turn permits critique of rule-based and more overtly cognitive models of agency structure. It also leads some of its proponents into areas that would not normally be viewed as topics for the field.

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Despite the philosophical tradition from Plato onward, sociologists have not yet explored in full music's role as an active ingredient in social formation. This project has been left to environmental psychologists and market researchers who are more interested in`what' music can cause than in exploring its mechanisms of operation and the implications of these mechanisms for the constitution of social agency. This paper draws upon ethnographic research in and around High Street retail outlets to examine music's role in shaping consumer agency ± in-store conduct, purchase behaviour subjectivity, identity. Exploring music in this way illuminates the interface of material culture, social action and subjectivity. Music is used by retailers to signal target clientele and brand image and to structure the temporal dimensions of the retail to environment over the day, week and year. It is also used to structure in-store conduct. It is more important in relation to younger shoppers and to`browsers'. Some stores rely upon unacknowledged skill of sales assistants, who often act as ambassador users of store products, to make and implement local music policies. Music provides contextualization cues that may structure in-store subjectivity and clients' orientations to themselves as consumers and to goods on display. The heightened degree of aesthetic reflexivity exhibited by younger shoppers may be part of a transformation of the processes in and through which agency is produced and reproduced, one that is linked to an ascendancy of commercial control over agency's constitution.Throughout history, music has been integral to social organization. Martial music, liturgical music, national anthems, serenades, lullabies, dinner table music ± these and many other genre have been enlisted to structure human agency. In the twentieth century, broadcast media and the record industry have increased the flexibility ± and subtlety ± with which music can be deployed. Today, in restaurants, pubs and clubs, waiting rooms, workplaces and on-hold telephone lines, invisible minstrel's galleries pipe to the tune of commercial and corporate agendas.To be sure, the question of how music works ± its social`powers' is not new. Aristotle considered music to possess`the power of producing an effect on the