Hey there! I’ve been using Plex for over a decade, mainly for music. The recent client split has made things even more limited, but music issues have been around forever across all platforms.
Here’s the deal: music can have up to 3–4 levels of genre classification, which have even been mentioned on this forum before:
-
Primary or root genres define the main group (Metal, Rock, Folk, Pop, Jazz, etc.)
-
Secondary genres often form a set of multi-genre tags (Hard Rock, Power Metal, Folk Rock, etc)
-
Styles
-
Moods are rarely used and don’t have a strict connection to genres
Let me give you an example: Evan Caminiti. His primary genre/group is Ambient. His genres/styles include Drone, Experimental Rock, Post-Minimalism, Indie Rock, and Experimental Electronic. Genres usually define the general musical character of an artist, while styles highlight unique features that set them apart from other artists in similar genres. So, ideally, you should be able to use all metadata together when cataloging music.
Now, here’s the problem: only the Plexamp is available for music on mobiles and in the UI, genres aren’t visible. Plex doesn’t use built-in group, style, and mood tags but fills metadata with genres, styles, and moods from the web. In the artist list, you only see the first genre, and on the artist/album page, only styles are shown. This makes the information less obvious and sometimes inaccurate.
Take October Falls, for example. They have albums in Black/Folk Metal and Dark/Neo Folk, which are almost opposite in style. But the style is only marked for the metal albums, so when I open one, I have no idea whether it’s metal or folk. This basically forces me to either ignore the uniqueness of styles as metadata or use them in place of genres.
There’s still search, where you can specify genres or their combinations, but let’s be honest—that’s like using a back door instead of the main entrance.
