I don't think there is a perfect way to organize a music collection in a hierarchical manner, so I don't even bother. Good tag metadata and foobar's search does all the work for me.
To me, the purpose of a filesystem is not to implement fine-grained categorization, but to provide basic grouping of related files so that I can easily operate on them all at once. To this end, my music collection mostly consists of one folder per album in a root music directory. Folders are usually named "Artist/Group Name - Album Title". That naming scheme doesn't always fit (albums featuring various artists, soundtracks in which I'm more likely to care about the title of the work rather than the artist that composed it, etc), but I don't try to separate soundtracks from regular albums or anything like that, I just throw them in the same root directory. With this scheme, it's easy to delete/share/transcode an album when it's contained within a single directory, convenient for people I share with, and I don't waste any time obsessing over something that I rarely need to see.
Some people have advocated a more database or metadata-oriented approach where you strip all metadata from the filename and folder hierarchy and stuff all your files in one directory. It's an interesting idea, for sure, more closely resembling the way web services like Youtube store their content. It makes one begin to imagine a desktop operating system that featured a metadata database as the primary filesystem organization scheme in place of the traditional hierarchical filesystem.
With our currently available tools, however, having some kind of useful metadata in the filename and/or filesystem hierarchy, even if it is redundant, is incredibly useful when performing manual file manipulation, especially the aforementioned sharing of files. You'd need ubiquitous categorization metadata in files (that is, not just ID3 and company for music files) and ubiquitous support for parsing this metadata in everyday applications (that is to say, when beginning a download of a song or a document, your web browser would show you the relevant metadata and hide the filename, if it exists. when opening a file, one would have to be greeted with a search box instead of a traditional hierarchy dialog) before we could ever entirely transition from having meaningful filenames to having meaningless hashes, timestamps, or garbage as the primary identifiers of files.
To me, the purpose of a filesystem is not to implement fine-grained categorization, but to provide basic grouping of related files so that I can easily operate on them all at once. To this end, my music collection mostly consists of one folder per album in a root music directory. Folders are usually named "Artist/Group Name - Album Title". That naming scheme doesn't always fit (albums featuring various artists, soundtracks in which I'm more likely to care about the title of the work rather than the artist that composed it, etc), but I don't try to separate soundtracks from regular albums or anything like that, I just throw them in the same root directory. With this scheme, it's easy to delete/share/transcode an album when it's contained within a single directory, convenient for people I share with, and I don't waste any time obsessing over something that I rarely need to see.
Some people have advocated a more database or metadata-oriented approach where you strip all metadata from the filename and folder hierarchy and stuff all your files in one directory. It's an interesting idea, for sure, more closely resembling the way web services like Youtube store their content. It makes one begin to imagine a desktop operating system that featured a metadata database as the primary filesystem organization scheme in place of the traditional hierarchical filesystem.
With our currently available tools, however, having some kind of useful metadata in the filename and/or filesystem hierarchy, even if it is redundant, is incredibly useful when performing manual file manipulation, especially the aforementioned sharing of files. You'd need ubiquitous categorization metadata in files (that is, not just ID3 and company for music files) and ubiquitous support for parsing this metadata in everyday applications (that is to say, when beginning a download of a song or a document, your web browser would show you the relevant metadata and hide the filename, if it exists. when opening a file, one would have to be greeted with a search box instead of a traditional hierarchy dialog) before we could ever entirely transition from having meaningful filenames to having meaningless hashes, timestamps, or garbage as the primary identifiers of files.