Which is unfortunate because it has (on a tiny number of releases) instruments and vocal tags. It's just so unreliable. AllMusic is another decent source for tags, but not instruments. It's the age-old problem with ML/AI: data quality. Garbage in, garbage out. If only we could crowd-sourcev listeners and get them to tag music from a list of available moods, instruments etc. Oh wait .. that's exactly the feature that recommendations services have been removing for the last 10 years.
User tagging isn't a panacea either, because people tag inconsistently, and people who tag a lot are probably not very representative.
For an extreme example of that, see the boorus. Some machine learning people have become interested in those, since they are huge dataset of extensively tagged material ... or maybe it's the booru people who have become more interested in machine learning. Either way, I'm sure they're great, if you're into waifu anime, porn, or waifu anime porn. Both types, country AND western, as they said in the Blues Brothers movie. Any tag remotely subjective (such as "beautiful", God help you) is going to be extremely coloured by the tastes of an extreme fringe.
At least, relying on fanatics to do the work for them, I assume they've got a handle on simple spam on the boorus. Commercial recommender service tagging systems don't have that luxury, and that's probably why they end up eventually removing them.
This is very true. I'd pay for a metadata-only / playlist service that works with Spotify/Tidal/Apple/local music.
And don't allow free-text tags. Instead you give a list of available tags - the lowest number needed to describe most tracks. I mean, let people add their own if they want, but you should ignore those while training the model.
I actually think that instead of trying to tag some specific mood (eg "happy") some sounds be a sliding scale between two opposites:
happy<-------|--->sad
Instrument tags are easier to understand. Give a list of instruments (or instrument types, because the user might not know precisely which woodwind or percussion instrument it is) with checkboxes beside each.
Some users will be experts because they play woodwind. Let those users apply to become experts, pass a test, "identify the instrument", and if they pass, give them half price subscription as long as they moderate X tunes per week.
rateyourmusic.com is an alternative to allmusic.com while chosic.com focuses on finding music.
The later has generated more similar music for me so far. But I welcome every additional project improving the search for music which has been so neglected by most services.
I've been a paying subscriber to rateyourmusic for years because one extra feature you get is per-track ratings. Extremely useful if you're in discovery mode.
