Blog1 min read
On the length of a playlist
Why most of these are under an hour and not three.
Most of the playlists on the site are under an hour. None of them are three hours. The temptation, on a streaming platform that imposes no cap, is to build long. I think long is mostly wrong.
A playlist is partly a piece of writing. It has a shape, an arc, an opening and a closing. Past a certain length you can't hold any of that. Tracks fifty and fifty-one don't relate to each other, they just happen to be adjacent on a list, and the playlist has stopped being a playlist and started being a station.
There's also a listener thing. A forty-five-minute playlist is a contract: this room, for this long. A three-hour playlist makes no contract. It just runs. People put on long playlists for the same reason they leave a TV on — to fill a room — and that's a fine use of music but it's not what these playlists are for.
If a playlist genuinely needs three hours, it's two playlists. Or three. The site is structured around small rooms for that reason. Each room is a contract you can take or leave.