I suspect that they just didn't have the right people on the team, or those people were busy and haven't gotten around to it.

This is sad, but it's an important cautionary tale for businesses that plan to collect data first, and later hire a data person to turn that data into gold. Many, many businesses in the 2010s probably failed because they thought they could do this.

The truth is that you need data people involved from the beginning, and continuously throughout the project, in order to monitor and evaluate the data being collected, building proof-of-concept models along the way, and to adjust the data collection process as problems are discovered and new techniques are developed.

And yes, another vote here for early proofs of concept and rigorous testing. Not everybody gets what really matters in data quality, but the surest way to find out is to try to build something and see if it really works.

You are correct, those issues were apparent right from the beginning, and they never really got better. The acoustic fingerprinting worked sorta OK for very popular albums -- but even for that, it was never 100% accurate. It never worked well for live performances, imports, classical music, jazz, or jam bands.

Using this software always required a lot of manual intervention, which at least for me negates the whole point of using it in the first place.