Every record I release has to be given a genre. It is a required field in most places, and I have never once filled it in without feeling like I was lying slightly.

Take Personal touch. It is deep house. That is accurate — the tempo is right, the drums are right, a deep house DJ could play it without anyone blinking. And it tells you nothing whatsoever about what it is like to listen to. There are deep house records that make you feel like dancing and deep house records that make you feel like phoning your mother. Same genre. Same shelf.

Genre is a filing system built for record shops. It answers where does this go, which was a real problem in 1994 when the answer determined which physical box a customer flipped through. It has never answered how does this feel, because a shelf cannot hold that.

So there is a thing here called the Feel Test, and it is the part of this platform I am most attached to.

It works like this. You get twenty-five seconds of a record. Not the whole thing, not the artwork, not the title, not my name attached to it in a way that primes you. Twenty-five seconds. Then you say how it felt — dreamy, restless, nostalgic, euphoric, whatever fits — and when it might belong. Late night. The commute. Sunday morning.

And here is the part that matters: you do not get to see what everyone else said until you have answered. That is deliberate and it is the single most important design decision on this platform. The moment you show someone the crowd's answer first, you have not collected an opinion. You have collected an echo.

The reason I built it is that I have been describing my own music for seven years and I am the worst available person for the job. I know what I meant. I have no access at all to what it does. The gap between those two things is where most of the interesting information lives, and until now there has been no way to get at it that is not just reading comments and hoping.

So the moods on this platform are not mine. They come from whoever listened. Over time a record ends up described by the people it happened to, which strikes me as far more honest than a dropdown I filled in at two in the morning to satisfy a distributor.

It takes twenty-five seconds. That is genuinely the whole ask. You do not need an account to hear it, though you do need one for your answer to count, which is not a growth tactic — it is just that otherwise the same person could vote four hundred times and the whole thing becomes fiction.

Right now the counts are tiny. Two listeners here, one there. I am not going to dress that up. A community-shaped description of a record needs a community, and on day one what it has is a handful of people and a lot of optimism. Early answers count for more, if that helps.

Go and take one. Do not think about it too hard — the instant reaction is the useful one, and overthinking a feeling is how you end up with a genre.