Someone should do a study to see the effect of over-bearing block head managers effect workers. I doubt we’ll ever get rid of those though.
This is just like the net and everything else. It’s some HR guy or exec getting his rise on through passing completely ineffective and irrelevant regs that only lead to p***ing everyone off. As you said, this has only lead to everyone listening to radios in the open air, probably leading to distraction to other employees and decreasing their productivity.
Also, my lead reason for leaving my last job was the horrible adult contemporary music that was blasting out of all the office phones. That was a design position btw, not something dead end. After 3 years, I couldn’t take it!