I almost always listen to music in solitude.
There are several reasons:
I am able to get more deeply into the music if I am alone.
I feel more free to change what I am listening to on a whim.
But mostly, because my tastes tends toward the progressive, avant-garde, intense, 'thorny' sounding.
My wife's and my tastes overlap quite a bit. We both like standard prog quite a bit (Yes, Genesis, King Crimson, Anglagard, Echolyn, Gentle Giant, PFM, etc), but when I break out the more avant-garde stuff, I loose her (Henry Cow, Univers Zero, Thinking Plague, Art Zoyd, etc).''
She can also hang with Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather Report, Brand X, Return o Forever, etc. But then, when I break out progressive and avant-garde jazz (John or Alice Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Pharaoh Sanders, Thomasz Stanko, Anthony Braxton, Michael Formanek, Tim Berne, etc), she's gone.
She also doesn't stick around with atonal classical music (Elliott Carter, Bruno Maderna, Joan Tower, Magnus Lindberg, Berg, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, etc).