Stop Watching Videos without Headphones
I'm begging you
Welcome back to Can’t Get Much Higher, where music and data meet. If you’re new here, our flagship newsletter goes out each Thursday, and it is typically using analytics to demystify music. In addition, I send out one to two other newsletters per week for paid subscribers. Many of these are interviews with musical luminaries. I’ve spoken with streaming executives, hit songwriters, critics, and so many others. You can check out all of the interviews here. Now, time for a rant.
Stop Watching Videos without Headphones
By Chris Dalla Riva
I’m a sucker for a sauna. When I started going to a new gym a year ago, I noticed they had a sauna at the back of the locker room. I hadn’t used a sauna in years, but my membership included access, so I decided to slip in after a workout. Sweat dripping from my pores as I read a book, I was in love. I now seldom leave the gym without hitting the sauna. A recent event almost made me rethink that practice, though.
As I said, I usually read in the sauna. This is not common. Most people either sit in silence, talk quietly with someone next to them, or listen to music through their headphones. But someone had a different approach the other day. He was a young guy who couldn’t have been older than 25. After staring into the distance for a moment, he took out his phone, opened up TikTok, and started scrolling with his phone on full volume.
If you’ve ever had someone sitting near you watching TikToks without headphones in, you know how annoying it can be. You hear snippets of disjointed sound every couple of seconds. When my fiancé does this while we’re sitting next to one another on the couch, it’s bothersome but something I can sort of tune out. When it’s a random dude sitting in a full sauna, it’s infuriating.
For a couple of minutes, my fellow sauna patrons and I were giving each other confused looks. Was this some sort of joke? The social media cacophony was not conducive to post-workout relaxation. Luckily, an older gentleman spoke up.
“Would you mind putting headphones in?” he asked the younger guy. “Oh, sorry,” he responded. “I don’t have any.” Despite this issue, he did turn the volume off. But I remained dumbstruck. This was insane behavior, bordering on antisocial. It seems to be becoming more common, though.
In July 2024, The New York Times, Newsweek, and USA Today all wrote articles about people taking phone calls, watching YouTube videos, or scrolling on social media without headphones in public. A few months earlier, when an anonymous user asked “What do you secretly judge people for?” in Reddit’s popular r/AskReddit community, the second highest voted comment was “People’s self awareness like when they watch TikToks loud in a quiet room without headphones. Or not knowing how to act in certain establishments.”
Coupling these online complaints with my bizarre sauna experience suggests an important question: Have people lost their minds when using their phones in public spaces?
Where Have All the Headphones Gone?
As I read a million takes about this phone behavior, the first thing many people blame for it is Apple. In 2016, Apple got rid of the standard 3.5mm headphone jack and replaced it with a new connector. This made the large majority of headphones incompatible with new iPhones. Right around that time, we begin to a spike in Google search traffic for “bluetooth headphones” or “wireless headphones.”
This suggests that we can’t put the onus fully on Apple. As they changed the headphone jack, people began to look for new wireless headphones. Additionally, Apple still provided headphones with the new adapter until the iPhone 12 was released in October 2020. Oddly, if you look at the above graph again, we see searches for “bluetooth headphones” and “wireless headphones” begin to decrease in 2020. In fact, searches for “headphones” in general decrease around the same time.
This decline is typically pinned on the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, another common explainer for this problematic mobile phone behavior. If you were trapped in your home, why would you need headphones? You weren’t going to annoy anyone by playing something out loud.
At the same time, there has been evidence for increased antisocial behavior after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. If you have less people buying wireless headphones while antisocial behaviors are on the rise, you’re on a collision course with the behavior that I witnessed in the sauna.
I think there’s one more piece to this puzzle, though. And that piece is social media. For the first two decade of the 2000s, the internet was loud in attitude but quiet in practice. Most social media sites, for example, were mostly focused on text and images. Transmitting video over the web, especially to a mobile phone, was not feasible. But as mobile phones became more powerful, social media became more focused on video.
This is a problem if you don’t have headphones. You can mindlessly scroll through Twitter and Reddit without a need for audio. TikTok, Snapchat, and much of Instagram doesn’t afford that opportunity. You need audio. If you don’t have headphones, you’re going to have to subject everyone around you to that audio. That’s a problem as these sites have become more popular.
The good news is that if you compare the first three months of 2025 to the first three months of 2020, there’s been a 180% increase in Google searches for “wired headphones.” That’s great, especially if people are tired of the wireless world that most smartphones have pushed us into. What’s not great is that that growth doesn’t yet compensate for the decrease in searches for “wireless headphones” and “bluetooth headphones.” While we wait for this gap to close, please save your out-loud video watching for the confines of your home. I’m begging you.
A New One
"This Is Real" by feeble little horses
2025 - Alternative Rock
If Kurt Cobain took the soft-loud dynamic of the Pixies and made it palatable to millions across the globe, then feeble little horses have taken the same blueprint and mutated it into something both angelic and demonic. Their latest single “This Is Real” is a good example of that, moving from a gentle whisper to a glorious distorted mess in a matter of moments.
An Old One
"I Can’t Live Without My Radio" by LL Cool J
1985 - Boom Bap
On the first verse of the first song of his first album, LL Cool J raps, “I'm sorry, if you can't understand / But I need a radio inside my hand / Don't mean to offend other citizens / But I kick my volume way past 10.” In short, making noise in public is not new. But if you’re going to be a nuisance, at least make sure you’re blasting good music rather than brain-rotting TikToks.
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I was that sauna miscreant's age back when the LL record dropped and it was definitely frowned upon to fire up your ghetto blaster indoors.
Have people never heard of ear buds? Jeesh!