Mark Fleischmann

When it comes to my music library, sometimes I'm like a little kid. Buy now, think about the consequences later. My apartment was already groaning under the load of LPs, CDs, other media, and gear a year or two back when I suddenly went on an accelerated vinyl-collecting binge. When my workday was over, I'd sit in my armchair with a tablet, making one Ebay buy after another. On weekends I was off to Academy Records on West 18th Street in Manhattan to look for classical treasures (because classical vinyl is still cheap and cheap is what it's all about). Vinyl started overflowing from the shelves to the floor. Those LP-size BD/DVD-A/CD box sets made matters worse. Soon, and not for the first time in my life, I was in the throes of a full-blown LP storage crisis.

Doesn't the world sometimes seem unbearably noisy? The best advice I can give you is this: Stick it in your ear! I'm talking about Mack's Pillow Soft Earplugs. Made of silicon gel, they mold themselves to the shape of your outer ear canal and cut noise by 22 decibels. That's better than any model of noise-canceling headphones. With a few days of practice you'll get used to gently pushing them into the ear just enough to cover the opening. Getting used to the sound of your footsteps traveling up your spine (BONK, BONK, BONK) takes longer. And I must admit that eating while wearing plugs sounds like a horror movie. But I am no longer willing to walk out on the road-rage-possessed streets of New York City without them. I also find them comforting on buses, subways, planes, and even in airports—a siren at the Newark Airport security checkpoint once practically brought me to my knees. What will other people think when they see you with plugs in your ears? Who cares? Give up a little dignity and baby your ears. They're the most irreplacable components in your system.

Daniel Barenboim is using his baton as a stiletto. The outgoing musical director of the Chicago Symphony has lashed out against Muzak in a BBC lecture series. Starting in the 1920s, Muzak pioneered the piped-in music that follows you around like a talkative acquaintance with bad breath. Barenboim called it "absolutely offensive" and declared, "active listening is essential." In response, the Muzak people compared their product to the works of Erik Satie, describing it as an "aural background" and a "mood enhancer." But the conflict here isn't between foreground and background listening. It's between music voluntarily perceived as music and music involuntarily endured as noise.

The Universal Music Group is adding a couple of feathers to its record-label cap. Universal, which already controls nearly 30 percent of the classical music recording market, will now manage classical artists and book concerts, moving into territory previously off-limits to most record labels.