On the playlist someone shared with me

Receiving a playlist from someone is a particular pleasure that the playlists on this site can't replicate. A playlist from a friend tells you, before you press play, that someone thought of you for the length of forty tracks. That's not what a public playlist does.

As a listener I'm more generous with shared playlists than I am with public ones. A track I'd skip on Spotify's discover I'll sit through if a friend put it there. The personal frame buys the music a longer audition. This is information about the gift, not just about me.

It's also a useful corrective for someone making public playlists. The temptation in the open is to optimise for the average ear, which produces music that's polite and forgettable. The temptation in a personal one is to optimise for a single ear, which produces music that's specific and memorable. Public playlists could borrow some of that bias and would be better for it.

I try to. The five rooms are public objects, but each track on them got there partly because I imagined one specific listener who'd be in the room when it played. It's a small move, but it changes what makes the cut.