I’ve noticed that the “Suggestions” category is completely missing for all of the artists that I created in the past 1.5 years, whereas their songs do show up in the suggestions to TheoryTabs by artists that have been created several years ago.
For example I’ve created the artist page for Gerard Way in February 2024 and there are no suggestions on either of his songs, but they do show up in the suggestions to My Chemical Romance songs, the first of which was submitted in May 2013. I can provide more examples if necessary.
I think the suggestions are a valuable feature as the database is a great resource for discovering new music, so it would be really nice if this could be fixed. On a related note - how are these suggestions even calculated? Are you pulling data from YouTube, or are you analyzing user behaviour here on the database?
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My guess would be that the feature broke some time around 2019 as it seems like artists that were created in 2018 still have suggestions on their songs, but artists that were created in 2020 don’t.
I agree, it would be good for these to be updated/recalculated.
The suggestions appear to go just by artist, not song. I suspect they’re based on some kind of external database, since they are better than I suspect any algorithm based on TheoryTab user behavior could be and often don’t have matches for artists who were added long ago but are obscure or wouldn’t normally be listed as an artist. For example, there are dozens of songs from Sega games dating back to 2014, but no suggested artists: Sega - Hooktheory
The suggestions are usually excellent, although there are some weird points too. For example, three artists are linked from Jerome Kern. One is George Gershwin, an apt choice. The other two are Metallica and Moby, who have nothing to do with each other and less to do with Kern!
Also, a few artists, like Lorde, definitely should have suggestions but don’t. On the other hand, Billie Eilish (for instance) does, so it’s not just an issue of an external database that itself hasn’t been updated since 2013 or whenever.
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Good point about the Sega Tabs. That really makes it seem like they’re using some external database that matches similar artists. In that case it wouldn’t be surprising that there are no suggestions for Sega Tabs as Sega is obviously not an artist.
Yeah, some suggestions are extremely weird. Video game composer Danny Baranowsky exclusively has metal bands (and Daft Punk) in his suggestions. Granted his music is heavily influenced by rock and metal, but there is plenty of video game music on the database that would be more suitable as a suggestion.
The suggestions for Nintendo are even weirder, listing bands like Queen, Radiohead, Gorillaz, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Nirvana and even Michael Jackson. Also that list is just outrageously long. This doesn’t seem to be an issue with video game music per se though as the suggestions for Koji Kondo are totally reasonable.
Thank you for bringing this up, we’re currently looking into it.
Regards!
Dennis
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