On the role of repetition

Most music gets less interesting the more times you hear it. Some music gets more interesting. The music on these playlists tends to be the second kind, partly by selection and partly because the rooms are listened to by people who'll hear them a hundred times.

A track that earns its slot on a sleep playlist has to survive the hundredth listen, not the first. The test is built in: if I'm playing the sleep playlist nightly and a track stops working at week three, it comes off. The track wasn't bad. It just wasn't designed for the kind of repetition the room demands.

This is part of why so much of the music on these playlists is texture rather than melody. Texture survives repetition; melody doesn't. The third time you hear a tune, you predict it; the third time you hear a long sustained chord, you sink into it. Different evolution.

There's a real cost to this. Music that survives a hundred listens is often not the most exciting music on first hearing. The playlists do badly on a first impression compared to a discover-weekly feed. That's the trade-off — first impressions for hundredth ones.