In a recent study by one of us – on hip hop, metal and punk fans in Beijing – many informants’ answers were more or less unison: What initially drew the informants to the music was – the music! This shouldn’t cause any wonder. Why should anything else than music be what makes one passionate about music? Nevertheless, this obsession with the music (as it were) turned out to be an obstacle to explanation. Music psychology, analytical aesthetics, or cultural theory, all tended towards a distal, arm’s-length approach to music. Music, so goes the assumption, is first heard, and then there is a reaction, a feeling of empowerment, of enrichment, or of the sublime – feelings the achievement of which music is the means to. However, listeners in the study testified to having been struck by the music without any previous encounters. The music was new and virtually unknown to them. The feelings in question were instant, not an outcome of reflexion, not an outcome at all. And the power of this instant encounter, the informants claim, nourishes their life-long relationships with the music. Thus, to avoid what we regard as an impasse of cause-and-effect (or stimulus-response) models, we propose a phenomenologically oriented twofold approach. To explain the initial attraction to unknown music, we firstly refer to H.-G. Gadamer's theory of play, as a fundamental aspect of life whereby the listener becomes "played" by the music in the moment it is heard. Secondly, we suggest that that which is set to play in the listener are the pre-cognitive vitality-affects which tie individuals together with each other, and with the music, eventually forming what Daniel Stern calls ways of being together.