I have always been frustrated by recommender algorithms for music. It seems like the classifications for music—whether a result of volunteer classification or

I have always been frustrated by recommender algorithms for music. It seems like the classifications for music—whether a result of volunteer classification or from some type of mixture analysis-just don’t seem to match very well with how one “thinks” about music classification. For example, I like jazz. I happen to enjoy listening to Toots Thielmann (a jazz harmonica player). There aren’t many well known jazz harmonica musicians, so a recommender system always gives me a bunch of other harmonica players from other genres. This is not at all a good recommendation, since the style of music and the style of playing in other genres is completely different (and not of any interest to me). There needs to be a way of establishing “user input” as a way to weight the recommender algorithms better. Sort of like a search engine with “+” (more of this) and “-“ (less of that). Then maybe recommender algorithms will learn and get better.