[alanctgardner2]

The point is that democracy is not always good if you want to be exposed to new and interesting things. A million people will listen to Justin Beiber, or Katy Perry, but how does a new/obscure band get traction? It used to be radio spins, but radio is a dying medium. Beats is trying to give you something like your favourite local radio station, with an interesting mix of old favourites and new tracks that haven't reached a critical mass of listeners on other services.

In other words, if you only use people's listening preferences, you can only recommend established tracks well. Adding an editorial component lets you get ahead of the curve.

[timje1]

That's the purpose of the 'hot' algorithms that you get in a lot of ranking sites. In order to keep new content rising to the top, you can build algorithms that prioritise the rate of increase as well. Even weight the listens of users who historically listened to successful tracks before they got popular ('trendsetters' etc.).

So there are other alternatives to human curation when it comes to getting ahead of the curve.