We're Changing: A Sneaky Peek

We're three days away from relaunching our music site. If you're reading this, you've already shown a gratifying level of interest in what we do with music here at the BBC, so I'm guessing you might like to have a first look at what's changing.

The big news is that, from about 2,000 hand-built and increasingly shop-worn looking artist profiles, we're now going to have more than 400,000 new artist pages which assemble themselves automatically and dynamically from a variety of data sources from inside and outside the BBC, and which will be working much harder to promote the great content that the BBC generates week in, week out. So if you want to hear Pete Tong interviewing Röyksopp, see Bonnie 'Prince' Billy performing live for The Culture Show, or watch Seal's exclusive Maida Vale session, you need look no further than the page for the relevant artist and we'll have it covered. You can find any of these pages by using the BBC search box at the top of this page, or even just type the artist's name at the end of the url https://www.bbc.co.uk/artists/ (so, for example, https://www.bbc.co.uk/artists/pink floyd).

We're making our pages wider to bring ourselves into line with the rest of the BBC website, and once again this is going to make it easier for us to expose a greater range of the wonderful music content that the BBC is making. We're no longer faced, for example, with the dilemma of whether to offer fans of classical music the chance to catch up on Dvořák's Stabat Mater on Performance on 3, a BBC Four documentary recreating Handel's Water Music or Building a Library comparing available recordings of Dido and Aeneas, we can now cover all three.

We've added contextual programme recommendations to our artist pages and album reviews based on who plays which artists - so if you're reading a review of Marianne Faithfull's new album and would like to hear the kind of programmes that broadcast her music, you can follow the links to Nemone, Iyare and Shaun Keaveny's programme pages. (By the way, if you're interested in what's going on under the bonnet to make this possible, I'll be posting to the BBC Internet Blog early next week. I'll post the link here too.)

We've also got a lovely new homepage where we have a link to our latest blog post, a whizzy new way of showing the artists broadcast on BBC radio and again, just more space to show you the unparalleled range of music that the BBC has to offer.

We're ironing out several things over the weekend, so don't worry too much if you chance on something that's not working as it should. One of the things we're going to fix before we launch in earnest is our "contact us" form. In the meantime, please feel free to leave any comments here - good or bad.