A dominant strand in the sociology of music understands music to be a positive resource in active self-making. While accepting that music has many positive dimensions in modern societies, the author questions the view of the self underlying this understanding, and argues for the importance of a critical and historical approach to music and subjectivity which recognizes the significance of people's emotional experience. He then offers a more critical way of thinking about the role of music in modern societies, using Axel Honneth's notion of 'organized self-realization'? as a defining feature of the process of individualization in contemporary societies. Because music is held to have particular links both to the realms of subjectivity and emotion, and also to pleasurable sociality, it may represent a particularly powerful site where the obligation to be a sensitive and pleasure-feeling sociable individual in modern society is tested out.