Ben EdwardsMar 26, 2025
BBC Research & Development

Orbit is our pilot for a music discovery service that lets you find your next favourite song by exploring recently played tracks from BBC Introducing!

Find out how machine learning helped us to organise *thousands* of tracks to let you find your next favourite song:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/articles/2025-03-orbit-music-discovery-organise-analysis/

Then read about the design challenges of creating a way to explore music genres and styles... our experiment is called Orbit - and you can read about it and try it out below:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/articles/2025-03-orbit-music-discovery-design/

Organising music for organic discovery

Details on how we organised thousands of tracks to build a music discovery service that lets you find your next favourite song from BBC Introducing acts.

Mar 25, 2025 at 4:12pmWeb
Show threadewhacMar 25, 2025
@BBCRD This is a pretty neat toy. Will have to play with it more outside work hours.
Show threadGregMar 25, 2025
@BBCRD it would be good to find out how you can exploit it and other BBC services & utilities to start to protect BBC revenues, qualities and guiding principles against government incursions (recent Conservatives and Trump style)
Show threadIBBoardMar 25, 2025

@BBCRD THANK YOU for calling it "machine learning" and not jumping on the "everything has to be called AI" band wagon!

(And thank you for the cool research as well, obviously!)

Show threadHowardMar 25, 2025
@BBCRD This is brilliant, having a lot of fun with it. I keep landing on songs where, had I seen images or metadata, I might have skipped on by.
Show threadgorsefanMar 25, 2025
@BBCRD I was sceptical but this is really nice. Slight shame it doesn’t appear to use URLs to represent the state of what you’ve chosen - unless I’ve missed something! - which makes your selection not shareable and lost when you move between devices. As well as not being very “web”
Show threadMathieuMar 26, 2025
@gorsefan @BBCRD that’s a really good point, if this gets past the pilot stage we should certainly look into it!
Show threadgorsefanMar 26, 2025
@BBCRD @mathieuloutre cool, thanks!