The future of playlists, we're told by various experts and insiders, might involve better artwork or liner notes, or audio commentary, or sharper algorithms, or various bells and whistles that developers and data experts are currently working on. All of which seem like reasonable ideas but all of which are more salad dressing than salad, as if someone were trying to explain the future of movies by predicting what movie *theaters* are going to look like. I like bells and whistles and I adore (and miss) liner notes, but if anyone asked me, I'd tell them the future of playlists could and should be something much simpler, something for which the technology already exists at every service that offers playlists. The future of playlists, in my perfect world, is simply this: better music. Better flow. Better curation. Better ideas. Better, more interesting, more personal, more unique, more compelling, more sustained song selection. Who's working on that? Because I don't need any more gym songs, certainly not any more of the ones that some random curator/influencer at TIDAL thinks would work for my workout at my gym. And I don't need any more APPLE MUSIC dance throwback (whose throwback is this anyway?) or classical concentration (it's probably best that VIVALDI didn't live long enough to know this is what would become of THE FOUR SEASONS) playlists. The best playlist in the streaming music universe, which I've written about in this space a couple times before, is this continually updated view into FOUR TET's head, curated by him as a labor of love and now over 1,000 songs and closing in on 100 hours of music. It's part of a genre that I call "taste playlists," governed by no concept and no rule except here's what the curator wants to hear at any given moment. I follow a handful—of various lengths and various degrees of obsession—mostly curated by friends and acquaintances who make them for (I assume) their own fun. Maybe she's obsessed with French pop songs for 10 tracks or 10 hours, and maybe she then finds herself going down a '60s reggae rabbit hole for a while, and then maybe the new JUICE WRLD single pops into her brain. This is how normal people listen to music, and if you find one whose taste aligns in some way with yours, then bingo. Why aren't there more of these? Why aren't the major services actively soliciting and curating these? Think of them as audio INSTAGRAMs, endless scrolls and mood boards updated at the whim of the curator, which you can enter whenever and wherever you want. Maybe they grow over months and years, as Four Tet's does, or maybe the curator wipes the slate clean every few months and starts over. Maybe you'd follow SOLANGE's feed, maybe you'd follow BRIAN KOPPELMAN's feed, maybe you'd follow LEBRON JAMES', maybe all of them. Why don't these exist? Maybe you'd just follow a bunch of your friends and acquaintances. This is kinda sorta what a service like STATIONHEAD does, except that the model there is radio, not playlist: You can follow anyone you want, but you're confined to whatever song's playing at any given moment. You can't manipulate any given feed to your need at any given moment, as you can on a playlist. By all means, give them liner notes and artwork, too, and if someone wants to add some audio commentary, knock yourself out. But if the music selection isn't killer, what's the point?... But speaking of bells and whistles: A smart speaker that can announce each song on a playlist or radio station before it plays, but only if and when you want it to? Yes, please... A friend of a FACEBOOK friend said this astonishing photo of R. KELLY ranting at an unseen TV camera while CBS' GAYLE KING sits calmly in her chair, staring straight ahead at the empty chair that Kelly has abandoned, looks like a scene from an off-Broadway play. Perfect. Also, horrifying. I'm not sure there's anything else you need to know about this trainwreck of an interview, which continues on CBS THIS MORNING today and will be expanded into a primetime special Friday night, except that the play shouldn't, and isn't going to, end well... RIP HUGH FORDIN and MAGENTA DEVINE.