*1.2. Music Use and Functions in Daily Life*

That changes in daily life and music listening behavior go hand in hand has been shown in previous work. Music in general can take on an important role in everyday life, or at least as important as other domains, such as hobbies or food preferences [8]. In comparison to other leisure activities, music listening is the most preferred activity compared to sports, TV, books, movies, radio, and magazines or newspapers (e.g., people spend more money on music than on other activities; [9]). Music is often used simultaneously with other activities in daily routine [8,10–14], many of which have been missing during the COVID-19 pandemic [15].

Music in particular is known to be able to regulate mood and arousal [9,16], to cope with negative feelings [11,14,17], to express emotions [16], and to trigger memories and emotions [14,18,19]. Next to talking to friends, music is the second most important strategy for affect regulation [14]. These functions of music listening seem to come into play particularly when people want to change a negative mood or stress [11,14], because then, mood regulation is more important [20]. Certainly, music affects people differently, for example, depending on trait aspects such as personality, where people higher in openness and (slightly) extraversion are also higher in musical sophistication [21,22], but also depending on personal distress, where music can lead to a reduction of arousal and therefore, having a positive effect on fear, anxiety (e.g., [23] Daniel, 2016; [24] Knight and Rickard, 2001), and stress (e.g., [25] Hodges, 2010; [26] Kreutz et al., 2013).

Based on these primarily positive effects, it can be assumed that people use music to counteract the predominantly negative effects of the lockdown (see [3,4,7]). Music might be listened to because of its transformative power, that is to change cognitive, bodily, and self-conceptual states as well as one's energy level [27,28].
