On the listener I never expected

Email arrives occasionally from people who use the playlists in ways I didn't expect. The lo-fi room used by a long-haul trucker. The wellness room used by a hospice nurse in the hour after a difficult shift. The reading room used by a retired professor who reads two novels a week. Each one slightly changes how I think about the room.

The temptation is to absorb every use case and let it shape the playlist. The opposite temptation is to ignore the listener entirely and keep curating for the original brief. Both are wrong. The right move is to learn from the new use case without redesigning the room for it — the new listener wasn't asking me to change the playlist; they were telling me it worked.

What I've learned, over time, is that the briefs I wrote for the rooms were narrower than the actual uses. A room built for a writer's desk turned out to also be a room for a long-haul cab. The two uses don't need different playlists. They need the same playlist, plus a small generosity about what the room is for.

The footnote on the homepage says the rooms are for people who play these playlists in the rooms they live in. That's deliberately broad. The original brief is in the room name; the actual brief is in whoever's listening. The room belongs to them more than to me, which is, mostly, the right way for a public playlist to work.