On the office playlist

An office playlist is a different object from a personal one. It has to survive being heard by ten people simultaneously, none of whom chose it. The constraints turn out to be useful: the music has to be quiet, instrumental, mid-energy, and so unobjectionable that nobody walks out of the room. This is, mostly, the same brief as the rooms on this site.

Where office playlists go wrong is the same place public playlists do — trying to please everyone produces music that pleases no one. A playlist of safe ambient choices is technically inoffensive and practically boring. People will tune it out and start playing their own thing through headphones, which solves the office music problem by deleting it.

Better: a playlist with a specific personality, slightly under-energetic for the room, with enough texture that the listener can hear someone chose it. The five rooms here would mostly survive an open-plan office. Lo-fi best, focus second, reading and wellness if the office is small or quiet. The sleep playlist is wrong; people are working.

The other rule, which I learned the hard way, is to let the office actually own the playlist. A curator who imposes their taste on a shared space loses the room. A curator who builds a small playlist and then takes requests, gracefully, keeps the room and learns something. The shared playlist is its own craft, and most of it is restraint.