Log

One of the problems with Spotify's Discover Weekly is that it oversamples on songs I've listened to before, many (most?) of which Discover Weekly suggested in the first place. This musical ouroboros ends up producing an extremely narrow set of recommendations, which is antithetical to what I actually want from it—variety across genres. Critics have already solved this problem, and Pitchfork, Paste, and NPR's New Music publish well-reviewed albums every week. What doesn't exist is a good cross-publication playlist connecting those albums to their songs. So I built one over a weekend. The interesting work was iterating on the heuristic that picks which tracks best represent a well-reviewed album, which I've written up on the project page.