When we announced the five Casamoré Spotify playlists, a friend asked us 'how do you decide what goes on each one?' and we both started laughing at the same time. Because the honest answer is that 80% of the work is Tony and I arguing in a Publix parking lot about tempo. Here's how it actually works.
Step one is the maybe folder. We share a Dropbox folder called — this is the real name — 'MAYBE.' Anything either of us hears that might belong on a Casamoré playlist goes in there. Bandcamp Fridays, Boiler Room livestreams, record store finds, friends' mixes, the occasional TikTok clip where somebody has Shazam'd a track we'd never heard. By the end of a month, MAYBE usually has 80 to 120 candidates in it. Most months we keep about 10.
Step two is the car test. Every candidate has to survive a drive. That's the rule. Tony or I will load 15 candidates into a car playlist and drive from our place to Fort Myers Beach with the windows down. Any track we hit skip on — gone. Any track we turn up — flagged. Any track that makes us both shut up at the same time — that's a keeper. The car is the most honest room in the world for music. You can't pretend in a car.
Step three is the field test. The survivors from the car get played at an actual Casamoré sunset before they go on a playlist. That means the first few people to hear any new track in the Casamoré universe are the 200 houseguests on Fort Myers Beach, not the 2,000+ Spotify followers. We think that's the right order. The records are supposed to be dance records. They have to earn their spot on a dance floor before they earn a spot on a playlist.
Step four, the boring one: tagging. Every surviving track gets labeled with a time-of-day — sunrise, afternoon, sunset, peak, after, home — and a BPM, and a vibe word like 'warm' or 'dubby' or 'heartbreak-dance.' Those tags are how the track finds its way into one of the five signature playlists. Sunset, Slowly gets the 'sunset' tags. House of Love gets 'peak' plus 'warm.' The After gets 'after' plus 'dubby.' It's almost mechanical by this point. The taste already happened upstream.
And then, on the first of the month, all five playlists get refreshed, the old versions get archived so you can always look them up, and an email goes out to Houseguests the night before. That's it. That's the whole process. We didn't want it to be a secret. We wanted to write it down so that when somebody tells you a Casamoré playlist is good, you know exactly why.