BBC – Organizing music for organic discovery

It’s interesting because BBC Sounds replacing iPlayer Radio was one of the worst redesigns I’ve ever seen for discoverability. Even now, several years on, it’s considerably worse. Whatever the technical merits of the migration, finding radio programmes became much much harder, all while they push podcast content.

Any way you try to categorize and algorithmically select music is always going to be sub optimal because of the lack of human creativity. For sure, algorithmic selecting can lead to some great listening experiences, but if that's all we have then the totality of our music experience is devalued.

I quite like the interface they made for Orbit, but maybe not for the reasons they intended. I think a tool like this would be best if they open sourced it and let users feed their own choices in.

I've been a heavy Spotify user and it's not perfect but I am frequently delighted at how good its recommendations are. They often give me really obscure stuff, they know my tastes and they often challenge me, and I can tell that there's some clever algorithms that tap into what other people like me are discovering.

Equally as entertaining as Spotify, I find NTS radio [1] to frequently deliver brilliant listening experiences ... but in contrast to Spotify they have a tiny budget. The NTS 'rule' is No Rules Radio: so it's human-centric, often far out and cutting edge, and seriously entertaining. Humans are good!

[1] https://nts.live

The app itself is here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/orbitmusic

Not the most usable UI on the desktop, though I like the novelty of it!

It's interesting and I like the UI, though I do question some of the subcategories that appear to share little with their parent.