Blog1 min read
What stays on a playlist
Notes on curation — the simple test a track has to pass to earn its place on one of these playlists.
A track earns its place on a playlist when it does its job and stays out of the way. That's the whole rule. Everything else is taste.
The test I use is mundane: I leave a candidate running across three or four ordinary settings — a morning at the desk, a slow evening, headphones on the train, a small speaker in the kitchen. If it keeps working in all of them, it goes in. If I catch myself reaching to skip, it doesn't.
Most tracks fail the test for a single reason. A drum that lands too hard. A vocal that wakes the room up. A drop that pretends a quiet song is something else. None of those are wrong on their own; they just don't belong here.
What's left is music that you can put on and forget about. Which is, I think, the highest thing a piece of music can do for someone who isn't sitting still to listen to it.