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I'm not getting very relevant suggestions... about 1/50 useful ones. Even when I set hip hop and r&b to 10% in my Taste Profiler, I still get tons of hip hp and r&b suggestions. I also manually searched & rated at 100% my favorite bands, who are mostly classic country and rock & roll artists, but very few of my recommendations are in line with these ratings.

Perhaps giving users a few more options in the Taste Profiler might improve the system's learning curve. For instance, I set pop/rock to 100% because I'm a huge fan of artists like Tom Petty. If I get suggestions like Pink & Christina Aguilera in return, I haven't accomplished much. At the very least, separating pop and rock would be very helpful. I would also love to see a way to rate different periods of a certain genre. For instance, I love a lot of classic country artists but have very little interest in modern country. Rating artists like Hank Williams, Loretta Lynn, Jerry Reed, etc individually hasn't done very much to narrow the suggestions I've been getting.

Firstly, thanks for the posting.  Fantastic idea, being able to rate specific periods within a genre.  Will definately look into that one.

Support for genre rating wihin the recommendations will appear in the next site update.  You should then see the hip-hop and R&B artists/tracks disappear from the recommendations as you've rated the genres. 

Something we are looking at is the whole area of genre classification, as pop/rock as a genre is quite broad, so you can get Pink and Punk in the same recommendation (some people may like that!). There are sub-genres which provide a tighter grouping of artists etc., and we are looking at the best way to expose these at the UI level.

Right now there is some support for defining preferences to certain period, although its only exposed at the item page level i.e. if you go to one of your country artist pages you'll see recomendations which can be steered towards modern day artists, or all time artists.  This is one of a number of "biasing" algorithms we are trying out.  This one basically boosts the probability that a newer artist will appear. Another model that exists (in code, not exposed on ite, yet) allows you to boost specific dates within the timeline e.g. if you like 70s punk, you can boost everything around 1977, making it more likely that something from that era will appear.  This "era biasing" still experimental, but it's along the same lines as your genre/period suggestion, so i'll look at this one again to see how i can fit that in with the genre biasing code.

the whole idea of genre classification / subclass/ period rating(1970's in your ex) is a great idea.  i too am getting recommendations for music i've flat out rated 0% and yet it keeps coming back so toreally filter it down to periods or classes would be wonderful

separating pop/rock is a must in my opinion.  pop = these girls such as spears, clarkson, etc yet i get their recommendations cause i 've rated rock 100%.

 i know pandora is a competitor but they really do a pretty good job of recommendations by having you tell them groups you're interested in.  they really get some oddball, off the chart, very small label groups that are really good and fresh.  maybe work in a recommendation where you can specify groups like.......rather than just a rating of (i know you can search for a band and then rate them but it's not the same as saying i like groups inspired by.....or new musicians inspired by.....or if you're fans of so&so then you might like.....)

Considering that some artists have also had different periods, styles if you wish, having the time parameter in there might really make this site's recommendations different from previous attempts to define style :)

One thing that bugs me: It keeps telling me I should check out Nirvana's Nevermind, which I loathe and have subsequently rated at 0%, still it's always there on the homepage, I'd think any artist with a rating would be excluded from that box automatically?

danny

 "I'd think any artist with a rating would be excluded from that box automatically?"

That absolutely should be the case. We will look into it.

Hi MacGuy,

Nirvana has dissappeared, but I get Cake and Ween's the Mollusk now, which I have already rated :)

Did you get my mail with the user details (awake98 ;))?

Thanks! 

I had assumed that once you rated soemthing, the filter would take that and show you unrated things that you'd like, rather than regurgitating mostly the same set of items. I've posted a bug report that shows 5 out of 6 items rated at <10% i.e. "don't show me this again" - I'd like the "don't show me again" applied to all of my rated items as I know what they're like and don't need reminding.

Show me new things, not the contents of my record collection... 

EDIT: The zero rated bug is still there, the first two seletions pictured here are 0% rated previously.