Your own metadata cannot provide the type of relational info we are using here.
There is no meta tag which says: “this artist is similar to artists x,y and z” or “the most popular tracks of this artist are a, b, and c”.
So we are using last.fm which can happily provide that info.
And there is a way to always prefer your embedded meta tags and only use last.fm to fill in the things that are missing from the embedded tags (or which Plex cannot read from them).
So, in my opinion, there is no need to strictly go the ‘Personal Media’ way.
I am using this approach in my own library.
I have no issues with last.fm overwriting my own data.
I can have several different versions of the same album (because I collect some artist’s albums) and there is no mixup with other albums etc.
