I think the search bar suggestions need to be improved, namely by filtering by popularity rather than the current system (which seems to be done alphabetically?) Popularity could be ranked by overall number of user ratings. The number of letters required to be typed out to search for some of AOTY’s most popular artists seems to be too many. For example if i wanted to find ‘Black Country, New Road’, you would assume ‘Black Co…’ would be enough given their relative popularity - but even with that they do not appear on the artist suggestions, the top artist suggestion being a band with currently 0 user ratings. Another example being the omission of Tyler, the Creator from the list even with ‘Tyler, t…’ being typed.
Other problems arise when another artist with little to no activity shares the same name with an artist much more popular. The example of this which prompted me to write here in the first place was UK Future Garage pioneer ‘Burial’, which when typed in with the top suggestion clicked brings you to an unknown artist with the same name and only 4 ratings (versus the 3,384 of other Burial). I’m not here trying to say that up and coming artists should be shoved to the bottom of search suggestions in favour of already popular ones, but there are too many glaring examples of poor suggestions when searching for artists to not warrant writing here. Thanks in advance !!