BBC Research & DevelopmentMar 25, 2025

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.

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 threadMathieu
@gorsefan @BBCRD that’s a really good point, if this gets past the pilot stage we should certainly look into it!
Mar 26, 2025 at 8:17amIceCubesApp
Show threadgorsefanMar 26, 2025
@BBCRD @mathieuloutre cool, thanks!