Blog1 min read
On keeping this small
Why there are five rooms and not fifty.
The site has five rooms. It would not be hard to add five more. Music for cooking, music for running, music for studying versus music for working — each of these could be its own playlist, and the home page would still fit.
I keep the count low on purpose. A small set of rooms is a contract with the listener: I have thought about each one, I keep adding to it, and it's never going to grow so large that any individual room is neglected. A larger set would dilute that. Some rooms would inevitably get less attention than others, and the playlists would drift.
There's also a navigational thing. Five categories fits in a person's head. Twenty doesn't, even with good design. A listener who knows the rooms exists in a different relationship to the site than one who scrolls through them.
If a room never gets added, it isn't because I haven't thought of it. It's because it didn't pass a small test: would I personally use this playlist, monthly or more, for years? If not, it doesn't justify a permanent shelf. Better to write a blog note about the context than to spin up a playlist nobody — myself included — would maintain.