“so why no use it in the interest of making the user experience easier?”
Because it does not make my user experience easier, it makes it harder.
Walk into a record store back in the day when these existed in every town and city. First thing you notice is that all the albums on the shelves are seperated into sections: Pop, Jazz, Classical.
Go to the Classical section. You wish to find a particular composition you have in mind to search for versions by various orchestras. You first walk down the aisles past the alphabetical indexes and come to B for Beethoven. He is not the artist, nor the singer, he is the writer. There is a very good reason why the music store at the top sorts the classical list by composer. If they did not, and the record store across the street did, then every shopper would be shopping at that other store where they could actually find things. And now let’s say you want to also buy a popular album before leaving.
Go to the Popular Section (we’re back in the he 1960’s). You heard Jan and Dean’s surfer song: “Deadman’s Curve” on the radio, and want the album. So head for the Pop section, walk down the aisles. But not to W for Wilson,Bryan (the Beachboy who wrote the song for another group, namely J&D). We may not know and right now we surely don’t care who the composer is. Over to the J shelf for Jan and Dean, examine the albums for the song we want, and buy. The top layer (top folder) is set up by ‘artist’ in the pop section, if not then the confused customers would all leave.
Yes, the folders on my player are headed by classical, pop, jazz. Exactly like the music store was and for the same reason. But the subfolder structures are several layers deeper to make things several times easier than the 1960’s (the magic of digital).
The album and track info retrieved online database systems for classical is crazy, not useful at all. They need a system divided into 3 catagories (at least): popular, jazz, classical. The system is set up only for popular and so we wind up with ‘song titles’ like “Adagio” and ‘artists’ like “Mozart”. Who recorded him?
The NY symphony CD of “Don Juan”: The same online database lists the ‘artist’ as Mozart on a few tracks and as Levine on other tracks of the very same CD! And the opera becomes scattered to the winds on the player. There is no field for composer because in pop who cares about the songwriter?
Using folders, and more importantly a deep layer of subfolders, we can correct all this silliness very easily.
There. Now I feel better.