Noob question re: listening to classical-type music by genre

Starting out with last.fm, it seems that the "correct" way to start a stream sequence is supposed to be to choose an artist and let the site generate a channel from there.

However, this doesn't seem to be a valid way to listen to romantic/impressionist/modern-classical instrumental music, as all the romantic/impressionist/modern-classical composers I enter just give me channels that amount to mostly (1) opera or (2) early early classical like Bach and Mozart.

So does last.fm just (no offense intended) suck at queueing music written more than 50 years ago, or am I supposed to ban the entire opera and early classical genres one song at a time, or is there a better way to use last.fm to find a specific category of music?

Many thanks in advance...

Cool, thanks; I did try that briefly, but I think I gave up too quickly when the stream went to the other extreme and started playing contemporary impressionist. I'll give it a more thorough try and see if I can get better results.

Thanks again!

acreature said:
You may also like to check out the Classical and All Classical groups - their group radio might be more of what you're after.

I tried listening to the Classical group radio and the first two tunes were by the Stooges and Motorhead. Does group radio just select random songs from libraries of group members or does it actually play music that falls under the group category? I'm sure it's a group for Classical music, not a group for classic rock.

Also, I tried listening to the Classical Opera group radio and got "not enough data". Huh? There are over 300 members of that group.

Can somebody please explain this?

I rebooted my computer and tried again. No luck - for three different classical group stations it played the gamut from Swedish metalcore to Michael Jackson to delta blues. Urrrggggh! Frustrating!

But I think I figured out what's going on -

I logged out of last.fm and tried out those stations and they played as they should - nothing but Bach, Schubert, Chopin, etc. Then I logged in, it immediately started playing the group station I had on before I logged in (Classical Opera) and started in with the eclectic mix of stuff.

I think it's playing my library (which is rather eclectic) Why would it do this?

I really don't want to have log out and log in depending on what I want to listen to.

Thanks for any help.