Genres are over-broad, don't use them for exclusion

Roon Software Discussion
1

I have expressed my disdain for the genre classifications before, but I just found out how bad it really is, by using it to exclude stuff.

I have recently added a lot of Allman Brothers Band (the man died!) and they were cluttering up my Recent Additions browser, so I tried excluding the genre Pop/Rock. It didn’t work right, so I flipped the filter to inspect what is classified as Pop/Rock. Abdullah Ibrahim, Amina Alaoui, Ana Moura, Anders Jormin, Andy Sheppard, Anouar Brahem, Avishai Cohen, Azimuth… and then we get to B…

An overly inclusive classification is not a really serious problem when you focus on a genre, you just get some unwanted stuff among th good stuff. But you can’t exclude based on such an over-broad genre.

2

Rovi/TiVo gives us a lot of great metadata, but their Pop/Rock genre is such an umbrella catch-all that it’s basically useless. We’ve had to implement special handling over the years so that, for instance, Radio doesn’t consider Azimuth similar to Abdullah Ibrahim.

If you’re trying to get value from Genres and exclusion, you’re better off ignoring Pop/Rock and drilling down one level further.