On the point of the feedback loop, if we picture musical preferences as a mountain, with most-listened to stuff at the peak, I've been wondering what would happen if these algorithms (particularly Youtube's and Deezer's, but Spotify's a bit as well) would slide the mountain a little farther down instead of optimizing for the peak.
So to over-simplify, something like instead of saying "You just listened to an RPG soundtrack, here's another RPG soundtrack!" it would say "You just listened to an RPG soundtrack, here's a symphony".
The idea is to lengthen the links of recommendations to encourage more exploration and wider discovery rather than circling the same narrow interest constantly.
I agree, but I also suspect that this falls into the gap between what people say they want and what they actually do. Netflix used to have a huge library of classic and foreign films, but no one was watching them. The monotony of spotify’s recommendations is itself probably a sign that when most people get something surprising they hit skip.
So to over-simplify, something like instead of saying "You just listened to an RPG soundtrack, here's another RPG soundtrack!" it would say "You just listened to an RPG soundtrack, here's a symphony".
The idea is to lengthen the links of recommendations to encourage more exploration and wider discovery rather than circling the same narrow interest constantly.