On a track that arrived through Shazam

A surprising number of the tracks on these playlists I first heard somewhere accidental — a café, a hotel lobby, the soundtrack of a friend's film, the back of a Spotify-radio session I left running. Shazam, more often than I'd like to admit, has been the source. The track was somebody else's choice, and I borrowed it for my own room.

This is a small mode of discovery that algorithmic playlists can't really replicate. The track that arrived through Shazam was placed there by another curator — the café owner, the film's music supervisor, whoever made the original playlist. Their reasons for choosing it were specific to their room. Borrowing the track means recognising it works in a different room, which is, in its way, a small judgement of my own.

Worth being honest about: a lot of curation looks like discovery from the outside but is really borrowing with attribution. A curator who pretends every track was found from scratch is hiding the chain. The chain is part of what makes a playlist trustworthy — these tracks have already passed at least one other person's test.

The tracks I'm most confident about on these playlists are mostly the ones I heard in another room first. A café at four in the afternoon; a film I didn't expect to like; a friend's playlist I half-listened to during dinner. The room I'm building owes most of its spine to other people's rooms. That should be said out loud more than it is.