It probably wasn’t chose at _random_ even if there wasn’t a lot of thought that went into it. It was still an artistic decision. When I used to DJ a lot, I wou

It probably wasn’t chose at _random_ even if there wasn’t a lot of thought that went into it. It was still an artistic decision. When I used to DJ a lot, I would go to the record store and listen to dozens of records over the course of an hour or two and buy a handful of them. If you asked me in the store why I bought them, I might just say, because I liked it. Sometimes I had only listened to 30 seconds of it and that was enough. But ‘I liked it’ hides a lot of inputs. I might have liked it because it reminded me of another song I liked, or because it had a key change that felt emotional or it had a beat that fit in with another record I liked, and if you asked me to dig into my reasoning for any of them at length, I could have probably come up with a few aspects that fed into why I bought it. In most cases they’re just post hoc rationalizations because when you’re digging through all the new releases you don’t have time to think of that stuff, but that doesn’t mean they’re not legitimate explanations.