https://laurenleek.substack.com/p/temperature-zero-for-culture-why

Why everything is becoming bland.  I get this when playing music on Tidal; each new selection it makes eventually ends up in Pachelbels Canon or some other old chestnut, regardless of where I start: Brahms string quartets, 20th century experimental vocal music, …. She looks at three different systems: shopping streets in London, lyrics in music, movies people watch, and draws the threads together as a failure of exploration of a space vs exploitation of the space, resulting in convergence of local minima rather than an explosion of personalization options.  The solution, she posits, is finding a threshold of variance that allows such systems to climb away from local minima, a value she finds is around 5%.  As she says, this won’t work in a market, because it effectively requires a business to propose one twentieth of its offerings not knowing whether or not they’ll be leaving money on the table, a hard sell for a successful business.  So she returns to regulatory intervention in the markets.