On the playlist that didn't work

I started a playlist for a sixth room about a year ago — a 'morning' room, broadly. After three months I took it down. The brief was too close to focus and to lo-fi for the playlist to develop its own personality, and I was solving the wrong problem.

It's worth saying that out loud, because there's a kind of curation writing that pretends every project landed. They don't. A playlist that doesn't work is a useful negative space — it tells you what the existing rooms are actually doing, and where they're not overlapping with anything you can name.

The morning playlist's tracks mostly redistributed back into lo-fi and focus, which is where they always belonged. A couple ended up in the reading room. None of the work was lost; it just turned out that what I'd thought of as a sixth room was a slight thickening of three existing ones.

The failure mode I learned from this is wanting a room to exist before having tested the brief properly. Now I sit with a candidate brief for several months before opening a playlist. Most of them don't make it past that. The ones that do are usually already half-stocked from the existing rooms, and worth the trouble.