"Ultimately it increases entropy... let me tell you about the heat death of the universe..."

"No, Mom! I'm still afraid of the False Vacuum monster laying underneath my ground state!"

Heat. Everything ends up as heat.

I imagine a physicist would invoke entropy to describe the diffusion of pressure waves and vibration into other forms of energy. Neuroscience might explain the propagation of signals from the cochlea into the brain. A psychologist could hypothesise on the influence of music on our mood and ideas. A philosopher might talk about the influence of music on the way we build our society and how that feeds back into our music. In this way, the music never stops, it continues on as echos rippling through through the universe.

You absorb it into your soul and it changes you irreversibly forever.

As the waves from ocean, the music crashes on the beaches in your ears

Everyone knows this duh!

Into your heart!

Where does the light go when you flip the switch?

Check your fridge.

It gets stuck in my head for 3 to 4 days until something newer comes along and pushes it out.

It rolls up into the other side of the cassette. Just flip it over.

Sounds move very very fast, faster than a runner or a car, so it goes very very far away.

I'm not a scientist by a long shot, but my understanding is that sound if indeed a wave, carried by a medium (air, water, etc). Upon hitting your eardrum, this wave is converted by your eardrum and your auditory nerve into signals your brain decodes. The remainder of the wave continues though, until it runs out of medium, hits an obstacle (basically another medium) or dissipates. Again, just my layman's understanding!

It goes into your memory. That's why you can remember a song that you heard before.

The Langoliers eat it.

It stays in our brain and we subconsciously put it into new music years later, thereby keeping the industry’s corporate lawyers in cocaine for future decades to come.

it goes into your soul

It keeps traveling. If you splash some water, where does the wave go? Same question - it terms into something you can no longer see or hear... It never goes away. It becomes part of the world, forever

Music is what you hear - but it was only ever sound waves

The best and the worst go straight to your brain and live there rent free.

Unfortunately, nobody has figured out how toget rid of the bad songs that drown out the good ones.

The Langoliers eat it

Oh, dear child, it goes to the same place where you will go when you inevitably die one day: into complete non-existence, save for an echo in others' minds, and after a while not even that.

Sweet dreams!

In your ears

the music goes back again to be later re streamed to other people that might need it

Some of that sound rearranges some of your neurons so that you can listen to Never Gonna Give You Up whenever you read this

After you listen to a song, the secret police from the RIAA come and lock it up in a small, dank cell given minimal sustenance, until the next time they can send it to some seedy hotel, suburban home, or automobile, to turn a trick and make them some more money, like some sort of whoo-re for the ears.

"Everywhere, all at once. That's why if you put your ear close to speakers it might collect too much and that can hurt your ear"

It turns into memories and heat.

Tell him about the day that music died

Into darkness, my old friend.

I've come to talk with you again.

Because a vision softly creeping

Left its seeds while I was sleeping

And the vision that was planted in my brain Still remains

Within the sound of silence

It goes out into the world, to be merged alongside all of the other sounds, until it can be recycled as "new" music and you can enjoy it again:-).

It's still there, it's just in the past now.

It dissipates into the air like butterflies, or a cloud of dust.

Let's assume the kid knows it's a recording. It's still a valid question.

Like where is the recording coming from when the kid asks Alexa to play a song?

I never thought about it, as I don't have kids, but must be a bit harder explaining a global IT-infrastructure than it was for my grandpa to explaining how a VHS works. On a generalised level, that is.

"Where do you think it goes?"