What determines "popularity"?

For example, under the listing for the Discography of the composer Franz Schubert I get the following if sorted by popularity.

What determines this? Qobuz streaming, downloads, Roon owner’s libraries/plays?

And it seems that the same determination carries forward if I select the option to show albums from my library alone. That same Lang Lang album (I have it in my library) shows up first - even though I don’t think I’ve played it more than once. While other Schubert compositions that I’ve played many times are far lower down

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A similar topic is being “discussed” here Roon 1.8 Where can I see Recommendations

The popularity is from Roon users playing that album more than others.
A lot of people complained about the previous usage of a particular reviewers rating for the album - especially if it was reviewed a long time ago i guess. So roon have moved to taking the usage stats as the guide to which album is popular.
There is no more guarantee that you will agree with the popular voice than an individual IMHO but that’s where it is.

I’d say it’s Valence, here’s a clip from a Roon 1.8 Preview:

Valence does more than compare you to other users. It uses Roon’s deep metadata as its foundation, providing context about music and connections between the people who compose, perform, and produce it. Next, it considers your listening history before filtering for the results that are most popular, but only among listeners who are experts in that genre.

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I seriously doubt that. Too many compilation albums - things like Best Christmas Classical and Top 50 Classical and Top 50 Adagios show up in the top of the results for that to be the case.

It’s certainly not using my history or “experts”

For example, the top 5 for Brahms are -

And that Lang Lang album shows up at the top of the popularity list for every composer whose work is included in that album. And there are many there as it’s a compilation of many pieces, mostly single movements from larger works.

For Chopin

Most Popular at no. 5 we have a trumpeter with one track of a Prelude transcribed for trumpet on the entire album.

And there’s that Lang Lang album again

@support Can we do something about this completely broken engine?

For the record : I launched a test on the same Brahms + Discography + Most popular albums and I got a top five a bit different from yours but still ridiculous. Now, I guess those albums are indeed the top five most played AND related to Brahms the Roon’s players database.

The “most popular albums list” is however far more relevant when you select a specific work (Brahms Piano concerto n°1 for example). I guess it’s just up to us to use it when it makes sense.