Server Version#: latest
Howdy, y’all! I am quite confused about the artist’s music styles in the library: the style shows up as Pop/Rock, but it’s not, lol. When I look at the Spectral Wound - MusicBrainz , I only see black metal. Plex is the supporter of Supporters - MetaBrainz Foundation , which allows me to assume there’s some connection.
Here are the track tags:
And here are the settings:
main question is: where the styles/genres are coming from?
- track tags?
- musicbrainz?
- somewhere else?
it’s important to figure this out properly, so that the fixes are applied in the right place - either music brainz, or taggers.
When I looked into this I noticed they usually match the moods/styles on all allmusic.com which mentions it’s data comes from “Xperi (formerly known as TiVo)”.
In my testing moods/styles cannot be read from local tags, they are only fetched through Plex’s metadata providers.
Usually (but not always) the artists musicbrainz page has an external link to allmusic (as is the case with your example artist) which helps facilitate this metadata into plex. The same is usually true for last.fm data too (in my experience).
Oddly however, in the case of Spectral Wound allmusic has Pop/Rock as a genre not a style so not sure why that’s happening (the artist page has no style listed at all so maybe it falls back to genre in this case?).
Edit: forgot to say I usually just ignore moods/styles as I curate my own genres which can be read from embedded tags
yeah, i’m trying to find some use for style/genre radios 
still waiting for the reply from plex server folks - if they can shed some light
It’s pretty easy to check - literally just look at allmusic and compare the moods/styles shown in Plex.
If you have the latest three Spectral Wound albums do they all have “Heavy Metal” as styles?
90% of my music is 50+ different genres of metal.
Was recently reading the Plex music support docs and noticed a few little references to where moods & styles come from - basically musicbrainz via links to allmusic as I suspected…
Tip!: When you update an album (release group) or artist on MusicBrainz or submit a new one, you’ll want to make sure to appropriately cross-link it to other sources. In particular, you want to add the corresponding album/artist entry from AllMusic as an “external link” for the release group/artist on MusicBrainz. That ties the two together, allowing Plex to also benefit from the metadata available on AllMusic for that entry.
Correcting Your Music Content Matches
Music in Plex starts with the best-in-class database of music content from MusicBrainz and then also adds in the best-in-class musical metadata from AllMusic. Just a few highlights of improvements:
High quality artist bios, album reviews, and critic ratings
Improved album release dates (original releases vs re-releases)
Awesome artist and album art coverage
Clean genres, rich styles, moods for artists and albums
Upgrading Music Libraries to the New Metadata System
interesting. i thought that MusicBrainz is the source-of-truth for everything-music everywhere nowadays
musicbrainz is used for matching, but then other metadata is filled in from other sources - for example…
last.fm is used for track popularity, top tracks and similar artists,
allmusic for artist bios, album reviews, genres, moods & styles, similar artists and critic ratings
