[Thegn]

What I find curious about it though is that it's obviously recognizing the style - it plays 1-2 musicians from the "black" group, then circles into only playing Miller/Goodman/Rat pack and never comes back around to playing the music that I originally was trying to play. If it was behaving the way you are thinking, I'd expect it to mix the two styles.

[artichokeheart]

I think the problem is that the algorithms are based on statistical probabilities from other users. I.e users who listen to X also like to listen to Y. So we’ll add Y to the queue. Then Y becomes the new reference point. I mean that is a gross simplification but essentially if your musical taste is outside of 2 standard deviations of the norm all the algorithms are gonna suck. For me they do.

[QuiDortDine]

So what you're saying is it's badly designed?

[rajamaka]

It's badly designed for your particular taste, but it probably works for most people which is why it's used.

[hedora]

I’ve definitely trained tidal that I prefer some pretty whacky sub genres (this Northern European country, but only metal with strong brass sections, or contemporary accordion, hurdy gurdy, and a dozen other clusters like that).

I’d guess if you created a profile and loaded it up with just black swing bands from the 30-50’s, it’d do OK.

If not, and I understand their algorithm correctly, it would not only be because no current listeners make that distinction (as discussed up thread).

It would also be because the metadata doesn’t give any signal for it. They seem to use information such as record labels, song writers, producers, guest musicians, etc.

If that metadata has no signal, then my guess is that you’re trying to get it to racially segregate music that was produced before the big interracial marriage scare.

People were worried that if their kids listened to the same musicians, then whites and blacks (or worse!) might marry, so they created white radio stations and black radio stations.

Before that, I imagine there was a lot more interracial collaboration, and the metadata wouldn’t find clean clusters along race boundaries.

It could also be that the old metadata was never digitized.