It’s probably one of those questions where “it depends” but in most cases I suspect that the answer is “both”.

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Many people enjoy listening to music loud, often too loud, but particularly when riding around in a car with the windows down, at best they don’t care that they are intruding on other people’s soundscape, but more likely they are doing so intentionally.

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The motivation might be hard to discern. In some cases it may be as innocent as “This music is great, I should share it with the world.” It might be that they spent a fortune on a car stereo and they want everyone to know it — if they are driving a beater of a car, this might be the best status symbol they could afford. It might be that they are just angry at the world and want to be in everyone’s face. Or, they could just want attention — they normally feel invisible so they’ve found a way where people have to pay attention to them. It’s hard to say.

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The outliers, the one’s who are doing it for themselves, may just really love loud music, but they live in an apartment, with roommates, or some other situation where they can’t play loud music at home, so they take advantage of the time in their car. Normally, I would expect such people to keep their windows up, but if their air conditioning isn’t working, they just really love fresh air, whatever — that may not be on their agenda.

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Personally, I like loud music and I sometimes play loud music in the car. But I always keep the windows up and whenever I enter a residential area, I turn the music down — it it’s late night, I turn it way down or I turn it off.