While the pure science of music recommendation puts a heavy emphasis on novelty, Last.fm’s incomparable store of data about real listening preferences – as well as our own experience as music lovers – convinced us that it would be interesting to try a different approach. We noticed that listening to all-new music can be a bit heavy going. Similarly, just listening to your old favourites sometimes isn’t what you want either! A few shakes of the test tube in Last.fm’s radio and recommendations laboratory (known internally as the MIR or Music Information Retrieval team), and Mix Radio was born – a station that’s exactly that: a mix of the music you already know + some new recommendations!