Someone asked me why I bother cataloging every song in the AudioShow. Fair question — it’s a lot of metadata for what’s essentially a playlist.
The honest answer: I forget. Not the songs themselves, but the context — what I was doing when I first heard something, why it mattered at that moment. The AudioShow is a timestamped index into memory. Episode numbers are dates in disguise.
There’s also a curation argument. Algorithmic playlists optimize for engagement; I’m optimizing for something closer to taste. One song per episode forces a decision: not “what do I like,” but “what do I want to remember.”