On the first Tuesday of every month, about forty people pay four pounds to stand in a back room behind a kebab shop on Vicar Lane in Leeds and listen to a man play records off a laptop. The room holds sixty at a push. The PA is adequate. There is no lighting to speak of, and the ceiling is low enough that the tall ones have learned where to stand.
The man with the laptop is Wes Anaya, who spent six years building recommendation systems at Halcyon and left in 2023. He is aware of the joke. He tells it before anyone else can. "I spent six years trying to model this room," he says, gesturing at forty people and a radiator. "Now I book it."
The night is called Off Rotation and its entire premise is negative: nothing played has been recommended to anybody. What happens there is the thing the last fifteen years of music technology has quietly failed to reproduce, and understanding why is more interesting than another round of complaints about playlists.
