Pandora is the only one that even remotely came close to something worthwhile, for me. It usually picked stuff that I wanted to hear; and that was a decade ago. Every other selection service regularly fed me garbage.

Pandora was worthless, though, because of their skip limit (even in the paid version). Even with its effectiveness, it would still feed me junk.

This guy is a classical music guy, though, and all the pickers suck, for that. Classical has been treated badly, forever. I am extremely disappointed that Apple segregated classical into its own app, because I have always enjoyed mixing it in with my regular music.

One thing about classical music, is that every performance is a “cover.” Who performs the piece is just as important as who wrote it. None of the selection services seem to understand that.

MP3 tags are pretty much worthless. They are incredibly limited, and I don’t know why they have never been improved.

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kaelwd an hour ago | parent [-]

What would you add to MP3 tags? ID3v2 already has separate fields for section/title/performer/conductor/composer/lyricist, it isn't the spec's fault Spotify doesn't use them.

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ChrisMarshallNY an hour ago | parent [-]

It's the "pick any one" nature.

You have to classify every title as one type.

How would we classify Zappa, or Secret Chiefs 3? Are they jazz, alternative (a worthless category), rock, pop, heavy metal, comedy? Depending on what you listen to, it could be any one of them. Also, each song could be in multiple categories. Boz Skaggs was known for disco-style pop, but he was an outstanding blues performer, and many of his songs reflect that mix.

This is really a music industry problem, and software just reflects that. The bug is really in the Requirements phase.

	▲	AlyssaRowan 21 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Well, it's less of a technology problem than it is an industry one. You can have multiple entries in the genre list and they're freeform, for example Ambient;Electronic, in both ID3v2.3 and ID3v2.4. For Vorbis Comments, you have multiple GENRE= tags. Some players support this. In my interactions with distributors, it seems streaming services tend to support up to two genre classifications; though they're pretty outdated and general (even more general and dated than the Winamp genre list). I don't think they use the metadata presented much in the classification; in fact Spotify does its own estimation of 'energy' and other subjective emotions using various classifier algorithms.