Why does iTunes radio play death metal on my classical station?

dam@mgi,

Many metal songs have names that are evocative of classical pieces, e.g. did he mean "Valhalla" by Richard Wagner or by Grave Digger? Needless to say, that will trip up the algorithm.

It is a hard thing to fight. Is there a different classical piece (with a less ambiguous name) that would serve as a suitable seed?

Hmmm, if the algorithm knows the genres of music, it should be able to do better, regardless of title similarity.

Per your post, you specified a title. not a genre. Is it possible that the title matches something in another genre?

dam@mgi wrote:

The death metal is 4 tracks out of a few hundred. I think the starting point is a track, not a title. It's Arioso off of http://www.amazon.com/Guitar-Adagios-CD-Various-Artists/dp/B00028DNCW.

Interesting. First of all, note that Arioso is not a unique name by any means. Allmusic lists 15,000+ recordings with that name, and most of them are not the Bach composition: http://www.allmusic.com/search/songs/arioso

The streaming algorithm, which roughly works like "give them tracks that are similar to what we think they asked for, but add enough variety to not get repetitive," can easily wander into something you didn't intend.

I agree it is funny to hear death metal (or perhaps you were actually hearing symphonic metal, which is loaded with classical references) based on a Bach seed, but it happens.