Always on the prowl for new music, one of the features that I really like is the “weekly exploration” list in the “created for you” section. There are however two things that detract somewhat from the appeal of this feature, so I thought I’d just share them here and let the LB overlords decide whether they wish to take them into consideration. First:
Ostensibly, the algorithm behind the weekly exploration list was of the opinion that I should be listening Boards of Canada. More precisely, it thought I should be listening to “Music Has the Right to Children”. Not only did it include a few select tracks; it included nearly the entire album in the exploration list and kept including them every week until I finally gave in and listened to the tracks. Don’t get me wrong: I like Boards of Canada and do occasionally listen to them, but the many similar tracks resulted in a very homogeneous listening experience. Also, I was already familiar with the album so there was little exploration going on in a large chunk of this list. So my first suggestion would be:
1) Limit the number of listening suggestions to one or two per album and/or artist
A second thing is that the algorithm appears to think that I have been living under a rock for most of my life. It has suggested at various times “Space Oddity”, “Message in a Bottle” and “Billie Jean”. These are all very worthy tracks to be sure, but IMO do not belong in any list that bears the word “exploration” in its title. So my second suggestion would be to either change the title to “Boomer Radio” or:
2) Do not include any of the global top listened tracks, as they are probably already known to the recipient user
And there you have it. I really appreciate the exploration feature and think it can be easily improved by adopting some simple tweaks. Other participants are of course welcome to share their thoughts or provide additional suggestions in the comments below.
