We report the results of a survey on music listening and management behaviours. The survey was conducted online with 222 participants with mostly technical backgrounds drawn from a college age population. The median size of offline music collections was found to be roughly 2540 songs (both physical media and digital files). The major findings of our survey show that elements such as familiarity of songs, how distracting they are, how much they match the listener’s mood, and the desire of changing the mood within one listening session, are all affected by the activity during which music is listened to. While people want to have options for manipulating the above elements to control their experience, they prefer a minimal amount of interaction in general. Current music players lack such flexibility in their controls. Finally, online recommender systems have not gained much popularity thus far.