Hackin' Music

YouTube Music's app opens with a list of 20 songs that you can start a "radio" station from. These songs are usually either songs you've listened to and liked recently, or songs that are similar. For example, if you recently liked Elton John then you may notice Billy Joel popping up.

For the past few days, my list has been mostly music from Cyberpunk 2077's soundtrack. What makes this noteworthy is that "mostly" means 12 of the 20 as opposed to the usual 5 that appear when I listen to a new artist.

I think I know the reason for this. C2077's music is divided among several albums: 2 primary soundtracks, 5 radio soundtracks/playlists, and several singles for the band "Samurai". The radio albums' songs are almost all from different artists. If YTM prevents one radio-suggestion-unit from filling up your page by limiting it to 5 (arbitrary number - not fact) per artist/album, the split across several would break that.

For example, if you're like me and listen to one artist a lot for a week at a time, it would prevent more than 5 of those radio suggestions from being related to that artist. Likewise, if you're listening to a movie soundtrack with many different artists (Spiderverse, maybe?), then only 5 of those suggestions could be from that album or the artists on it. But listening to Artist A from Album 1 and Artist B of Album 2 of the same collection doesn't trigger the same limit because they're considered too far apart. Instead, it's 10 suggestions - 5 for AAA1 and 5 for ABA2.

The above isn't a fully thought out idea and doesn't have much application. Maybe a music label could use this maliciously by having several songs by different artists in a multi-volume soundtrack for a movie, all of them belonging to the same label.