Designed Not to Scale — A Thought on Listening, Homes, and What Comes Next
By Rafi Mercer
There’s a temptation, when an idea feels good, to immediately ask how big it could be. How many cities. How many users. How quickly it could move. I feel that pull too — it’s almost automatic, like reaching for the volume knob before you’ve even sat down.
But this listening-at-home idea keeps resisting that instinct. And I think that resistance is the clue.
At face value, it’s simple. Almost disarmingly so. A few people. A living room. A record played with care. No infrastructure worth naming. No clever mechanics. No ambition to dominate anything. You could even argue it’s naïve. And yet, those are often the ideas that stay with us longest.
Some ideas aren’t meant to scale. They’re meant to reveal.
What this one reveals, for me, is how little we actually need to feel connected through music. Not a venue. Not a brand. Not even particularly good equipment. Just a shared agreement to listen — properly, together, for a defined stretch of time. That’s the atom. Everything else is decoration.
If I’m honest, I don’t know whether this ever becomes a “thing” in the formal sense. And that’s oddly liberating. Because when an idea isn’t carrying the weight of outcome, you’re free to observe what it teaches you. You can let it sit on the table, turn it over, notice which parts feel alive and which feel forced.
Designing something not to scale is a way of thinking out loud in the real world. It’s a way of saying: what’s the smallest version of this that still matters? In this case, the answer keeps coming back the same: one home, one record, a handful of chairs.
And yet — here’s the part that matters — ideas like this often unlock the next part of the puzzle without trying to. They recalibrate your sense of value. They sharpen your language. They clarify what you’re actually building towards.
For Tracks & Tales, this idea doesn’t replace anything. It sits alongside the work that’s already happening — the cities, the venues, the essays, the albums. But it changes how I look at them. It reminds me that the point was never accumulation. It was orientation. Helping people find their way to moments where sound feels human again.
A home-based listening invitation doesn’t scale neatly. It shouldn’t. The friction is the feature. The limits are the ethics. And if it never goes beyond a few quiet evenings shared between people who care, that’s not a failure. That’s fidelity.
But sometimes, by staying small, an idea gives you permission to see the wider map more clearly. It shows you where the energy actually lives. It points you toward what’s essential, and what you can let go of.
Maybe this idea leads nowhere. Or maybe it leads everywhere — just not in a straight line.
For now, it’s enough to let it exist as a thought, a posture, a reminder. Not everything good needs to grow. Some things just need to be true long enough to move you forward.
I’ll keep listening. I’ll keep noticing. And I’ll see what this small, unscalable idea quietly opens up next.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters.
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