HUMAN CURATION, no hallucination

Niche Playlist Design is a solo consultancy run by Music Curator and Playlist Designer, Mike Stier, created to document and showcase how he has shaped sound for real-world spaces. It is also his personal music lab and living portfolio—a one-person shop where all music curation, playlist design, and experimentation exists to show what he can do for the right company.

Every playlist is hand-curated offline and not auto-generated—built by one human-obsessed Music Curator who understands mood, pacing, and narrative, not just data points. This human-first approach to music programming has helped shape how guests feel, how long they stay, and how clearly they remember a brand long after they leave.

Fueling this work is Mike’s offline MP3 library of more than 1.2 million songs; a collection that began in the early 1980s and has evolved with the MP3 revolution around 2000. Over time, he has organized this database by genre and sub-genre, time-of-day, vocals and no vocals, explicit and suggestive content, clean edits, and year of release so he can build nuanced playlists to the whim and desire of any brand with a level of precision and quality. 

At Roundhouse Multimedia, Mike has worked as a Music Architect and then Lead Music Architect since 2014, and has handled both the human side of music curation, copywriting, and the structural side of playlist design for luxury resorts and wellness properties across the Caribbean and Mexico, relying on ears and experience rather than algorithms or A.I.

Additionally, through a partnership with SoundMachine, Mike can show how his customized, human-built curation can plug right into fully licensed, commercial-grade music for businesses. In doing so, he can make it clear to potential employers that he understands both the creative side and the compliance side of hospitality and retail environments.