My dad made my mom a mixtape on their third date in 1987. She still has it. She pulls it out whenever somebody asks her how they got together. My dad is not a romantic guy. He's a retired firefighter from New Jersey who owns two pairs of shoes. But he spent four hours one afternoon at a record store and another four hours dubbing songs off vinyl onto a single 90-minute cassette for a woman he wanted to impress. My mom has described that tape as the single most romantic thing any human has ever done for her.
I think about that mixtape all the time when I'm building Casamoré playlists. The technology has changed — I can build a 5-hour playlist in Spotify in 40 minutes if I'm lazy — but the underlying thing that makes a mix valuable has not changed at all. It's the fact that a specific person, who specifically knows you or at least specifically wanted to reach you, sat with their taste and made choices for you. That's curation. It's a love language. And it is the one thing the algorithm absolutely cannot fake, no matter how good it gets.
Spotify's algorithm will give you a daily mix that is technically very close to what you'd pick for yourself. That's the problem. It's so close that you never get surprised. It's so close that you never think 'wait, what IS this track?' It's so close that your taste never grows. A good curated playlist is the opposite of that. It drops a song on you that you would NEVER have found on your own, and the first time you hear it you feel slightly ambushed, and then you play it seventeen more times. That's the whole point.
So when Jack and I talk about the five Casamoré playlists — Sunset Slowly, House of Love, The After, Salt and Citrus, Low Light Long Night — we are not trying to compete with the algorithm. We are trying to be the opposite of it. We are trying to make you feel, every time one of our playlists lands in your queue, like two people you don't know spent the month thinking about you and picked ten new songs they think you need to hear. That's a mixtape. That's still the best gift anybody can give anybody.
If you've subscribed to a Casamoré playlist: thank you. You are letting us do for you what my dad did for my mom in 1987, and that is honestly the best description of this whole project I've ever come up with. We're the guys at the record store. You're the third date. We're not going to let you down.