Majority of artists being put in the Pop/Rock genre

I’ve recently been trying to flesh out and make more use of the music section of plex. However im having an issue with the artist genres mostly all being matched into pop/rock which isn’t correct leaving the other genres fairly empty.

Plex has 2 main categories for this, genre and style.

Genre (Pop/Rock, Rap, Electronic, etc.) is a broad classification while the style indicates a finer subset (Heavy Metal, East Coast Rap, Lo-Fi, etc.).

If you prefer to use a traditional single genre you can use the ones tagged in your files by editing the library and setting the advanced “Genres” option. Just make sure your files are tagged appropriately first.

I understand that and i don’t want to use embedded tags. Rather than being set as the genre Pop or the genre Rock or in fact any other genre that would be more correct pretty much every artist in my library has been matched by plex music in the Pop and Rock genre when they clearly don’t belong there.

How do i fix that?

If you’re not using embedded tags, Plex will get genre information from online databases. When Plex tries to match your album, it queries MusicBrainz. But MB doesn’t have a lot of genre info, so it likely queries a service like Last.FM. Plex may not be matching your album correctly (unlikely, or you’d probably see other problems), or the ultimate source of genres has something wrong.

Can you give some examples of the incorrect classifications?

Well i don’t know about ypu but i wouldn’t consider the following Pop and Rock.

Abba
Air
Acdc
Avenged sevenfold
Ben e king
Black eyed peas
Bomfunk mcs
Boy 8 bit
Bring me the Bullet for my valentine
Concord dawn
Dillon francis
Dragon force
Five finger death punch

Etc
Its matched over 200 artists in this genre and realistically there should only be maybe 30.
Its full of metal, electronic, drum and bass, heavy rock, blues, folk, R&B, Rap etc

Those look mainly correct.

You can look at the classifications on allmusic.com where these genres & styles come from.

Right so its incorrect on allmusic and theres nothing we can do about that other than embedded tags?

They do have a forum where you can report problems: Common Problems: AllMusic | Support for AllMusic and SideReel, you would just have to make sure it’s a legitimate issue (e.g. Abba being classified as Pop/Rock would not be an issue as it is pop, so I understand their classification).

Abba wasn’t a good example but i would think disco would be more appropriate. Other than that Its matching artists like concord dawn which is drum and bass and avenged sevenfold which is metal so theres definitely an issue here

One person’s genre is another person’s sub-genre or “style.”

The whole “genre” question is so subjective, I don’t think there’s a definitive list that the world will agree on.

Here’s what AllMusic has for ABBA :
image

And Avenged Sevenfold:
image

So there’s no solution?
Its acceptable that a broad range of genres are lumped together in pop and rock and when i listen to that genre and get drum and bass or heavy metal thats acceptable and not a bug with plex?

Is it a bug, or a difference of opinion? Lots of people, and online sites, use pop/rock as an overall genre and lump what some call other genres as sub-genres or styles.

Plex is reflecting what’s provided by AllMusic, so your argument is with AllMusic. Plex does offer the solution of using embedded tags, although it will still draw styles from AllMusic.

So are you saying the solution is then to use styles over genres?

And that’s really damn annoying!

@drzoidberg33 why is it like that and could something be done about this?

You either have to use your own embedded tags or the ones we provide. You could try use a different agent but those are generally no longer maintained.

Also it may help if I understood where this is coming from, what issue is the genre/style system causing you?

See the highlighted part of @beckfield comment.

I’m already using my own genre tags, but you’re still fetching and displaying styles.

Since allmusic is not user curated it’s practically impossible to add information or correct factual errors in information provided by them.

Yes, this is expected and by design. It doesn’t interfere with the genres at all and offers more filtering options, you can just ignore them if you don’t use it.

If I can’t hide or disable styles it would be nice to have the ability to control them with tags, but not even this is possible without some hacky workaround. Cool feature /s

Those Rock/Pop genre annoyed me too.

I bought a license of a music tagger (Songkong) and you can set this to use Discogs genres and styles.

Then I used @thlayli_x I script:

What @beckfield mentions is true, it is subjective. But you can always override it.
What Abba concerns, I can live with what is set to now :slightly_smiling_face:

Only thing now is to find the artists and albums without a genre or style and manual tag them.