Taking a tip from Discogs

Congratulations to Spotify for an award-winning performance at the TechCrunch Europas! It's been great to see the recent upgrades in search features and playlist view summaries. However, it can be said that album details are still sidelined in the UI (small footnote at the end of the tracklist), and the genres available both for search and radio are rather limited.

Focusing on genres, it would be nice to have some consistency with the detailed data libraries found at Discogs, Last.fm and on Wikipedia (múm, for example, is not 'Mum', and it is also not IDM). The more extensive and accurate the genre tags are, the easier it will be to find new (and relevant) music.

The Last.fm 'similar artists' feature has become stunningly accurate over the years in matching artists with similar sounds (partly because users do the tagging, and incorrect tags are eventually weeded out). Unfortunately as Spotify still has what appears to be a smaller number of experimental/less mainstream artists than it has of artists found in the top 40 who are constantly getting ad coverage on Spotify itself, the 'similar artists' suggestions are sometimes like comparing apples to onions when it comes to diverse electronic music, post-rock, instrumental hip-hop, etc.

Perhaps there should be a forum for the informational structure of the catalogue, where listeners can contribute and help amend details for more accuracy? In any case, it might only be the devout music connoisseurs who put in the effort to dig into the underground scene who will be the most bothered by inaccurate tagging and a mainstream catalogue. But eventually, what's underground will become mainstream, and I'm sure the catalogue will be more cohesive when that time comes.