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Comment by olsondv | Hacker News Reader

Or at a stop light and the car next to you is listening/singing to the same song. Never happens anymore.

It absolutely does - allegedly there’s 6 million listeners to the biggest breakfast radio show in the UK and 4 million to the second biggest. That’s 10 million in a country of about 55 million adults.

Unfortunately, they broadcast on DAB so there’s a strong chance that two car radios next to each other are buffering differently and out of sync.

At least my car is still using FM radio - 98.2MHz

It’s interesting that the DAB rollout completely failed in Ireland and we are back to fully analog FM

If I turn up my volume loud enough, then the car next to me is going to be listening to the same song I am :)

If you really want a reaction here, announce that you use your phone speaker or a Bluetooth one out in public.

In the 90s I knew a guy in high school who walked around the school in a black trenchcoat with portable speakers tucked inside that were continuously playing Western movie themes. I can only imagine how that bit of creativity would go over these days.

I suppose it was rare enough and somewhat fun in the 90s. Maybe that guy was doing this for others to enjoy as well, or to appear singular (whether it worked or not).

Nowadays it wouldn't appear particularly exotic (portable speakers are ubiquitous) and people playing loud music (from speakers or phones) seem to do this for themselves without caring about the surrounding people, that's just highly egotistical and self-centered. It's usually not music I personally like too.

That's not fun, it's just annoying. There's already too much noise in our cities.

But if you do it right, playing (singular) music for others, reading the room and all, I'm sure it can still work.

Sometimes, but not too often, in Berlin of all places you encounter someone biking around with a massive speaker attached to their bike blaring (obviously) techno

Not always a bike. Sometimes just a trolley or a handcart or a custom jerry-rigged contraption.

You see this type of thing daily in Brooklyn NY still, but instead of techno it's any genre, primarily hip hop, reggaeton, or afrobeats.

In the US "boom boxes" went out with the 1970s. They need to get with the times.

Okay, in all seriousness: boom boxes were a thing in the 1970s and early 1980s. There are still people who use the latest generation of them, but thankfully not nearly as many. These days people cranking music in a public place are generally doing it as part of a group that all want to hear the same thing. (and in back then the group wanting to hear the same music was the common case)

Here, in a small US town, the most frequent public music is one or two people ~destroying the speaker on their phone.

Second is probably motorcycles blasting it over the engine noise.

Oh I've never seen a boom box around. It's always, like, a box of car batteries and a speaker on top. Clearly DIY.

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