Pandora might already have similar infrastructure in place, if it’s still used. It’s just not exposed to the public. Once upon a time, actual human beings used to import CDs into the service and tag the songs with different descriptors. This was to help the recommendation engine build playlists around similar music. You could see some of these tags when you chose “why this song” during playback.

https://community.pandora.com/t5/My-Collection/quot-Specific-musical-qualities-quot-when-clicking-on-Why-This/td-p/190293

One thing I wish the recommendation engines took into account was the record producer. Usually when you find a song/artist you like — you’ll find similar music by looking at other albums the same producer was involved in.

No. My records can exist in one, and only one, slot on the shelf. So fuck everyone else and their modern crap. /s

Seriously though, i do much prefer physical media and all its inconvenient rituals . mp3s are great like radio, but slightly less so, but i'm never going to consider them real music. TBF i even more prefer it when the musicians are on stage and literally make sounds by manually wobbling instruments . I cant imagine anything less efficient.

Plexamp uses tags. Plex is a streaming platform that you host yourself. It’s using your own files, so it’s getting the tags somewhere. Probably not hard to find out where, I just never bothered to ask.

Tags are a better classification system in general IMO

That's actually an incredible idea. I hadn't thought about it but now I can believe it's not a common feature.

Yeah, I've wanted a good tagging system for music for a while. Spotify kinda has it but you can't assign tags yourself and the tags some songs have are.. interesting. And you can only select one tag at a time.

I used to make nested playlist folders, like I had a folder for metal music, and that folder had a heavy metal playlist, soft metal, metal core etc. But the UI didn't play nice on mobile, and if you shuffled the folder, it would add duplicates across the playlists into the queue so you'd hear the same song multiple times before the queue started again.

It's something of a local solution, but MusicBee supports custom tags/ filters and has auto-playlists that sounds a lot like what you're asking for.

I'm not sure if any of the streaming services have anything similar though. It boggles my mind that Spotify is a billion dollar company and there's no way to say "make a playlist with the discographies of all my favorited artists and keep it updated as they put out new songs".

I had a similar idea when I read that some huge percentage of data on the Internet now is just reposts of screenshots. Some redundancy is good (e.g. genetics) but it's hell for compression.