but I like seeing my C+ turn into B faster, I initially thought music exp gains were bugged after playing music for 30 mins once I got to C+ and my profile was still showing 0%.

Current exp rates promote people wanting to achieve that vanity to spam 200 BPM music instead of anything that sounds nice. Like your own composition for Glimpse of Us uses 77 BPM, anyone that wants to get that vanity would be getting less than half the exp playing your music even though it sounds lovely.

People'll try to get on leaderboards one way or another, at least have them be able to play nicer sounding songs instead of using one note for 200 measures in 200 BPM because that's what the people trying to minmax their exp/hr trying to get on the leaderboards will do.

You would think Music is a social aspect
They decide to make music grindy
Just...???

it's stupid now.  gonna have people everywhere just repeating song after song after song to get their music rank up.

Grinding oluns?  On top of your elixir rotation, now you can pop your shai to play a song before every pack.  

Just saw someone with C+  4% exp   rank 1 badge.  Dude was probably just repeating song after song since patch came out.

This has got to be one of the most pointless features they've ever added.
I honestly don't understand what purpose musicianship serves now that you don't even need it to use & play more notes.  
Playing in an ensemble should give more xp compared to solo and hopefully promote normal usage of the system.

I am not sure people realise the damage this has done to the music system, what they have done is introduce an extra mechanic where your client needs to inform the server the amount of bars it has played - from what I can tell it does this every bar as its played, which I can only assume is so if you decide to stop at any point it will only give you exactly the amount you have played - in doing so, it has introduced lagging into the music player which I am not sure if any of you have experienced, but it has totally destyroyed ensembles for most people I interact with, solos are also broken to a lesser extent - also, the system will also continue to play after the fact you have stopped a song (which I assume is the lag between your client saying - I stopped and the server saying "play the 5th bar now") - there is 0 reason for this rankable skill and the thing I find most bizarre is that it does 0 for actual composers - so most the people out there playing my songs have a far higher music rank than I

My vote is to remove this totally, as well as this rediculous idea of the album having a ranking system, especially based on "times played" I am fairly confident if every second one of my songs was titled "this is the best song ever" or to that effect, even if it was 10 seconds long - I would dominate the "ranking"

-= Terra =-

Why are the rankings just not based upon the composers in game who have the most downloads and hearts upon their songs?

The composer is running worse than ever for ensembles like has been said, and a lot of people who are in the top rankings haven't even made a song at all. 

Stupid update. The fact I can hit 11% by just clicking random drum tracks I made means nothing. 

It also introduced a lot of $hit "songs" in the music album, just crap to spam to get exp.

To add information on how the system works too, the amount of xp needed for B- to B is twice the amount it takes to get from C+ to B-. This being said it, theoretically if the system is goes all the way up to S after A+ and doubles the xp for each grade it would take over 2 years and 9 months of spaming the cheesing songs to get to the max level.

I think after roughly two weeks it is rather evident how the system is being abused by some people. The system should reward people that have dedicated hundreds, if not thousands of hours to using the composer and uploading music to the game.
Instead they decided to give icons to people that spend several hours a day AFK playing nonsense “music” for the sole purpose of gaining xp. It just seems ironic that they'd implement a system that (even if not abused) rewards the consumer, and not the producer.
It's just another fundamentally bad system that is also abused, similarly to how like trading in chat groups works.
For every minute of playable music in the Album there's someone that has spent at least 15 minutes to several hours making it.

Personally I don't value it, but I believe that if they are going to gamify this aspect of the game with leaderboards and icons.
That it should be based on some form of merit. Like other people have suggested: Likes,downloads and or plays, and not hours spent playing silent music in your residence.

Also, like Terra said, the music desync.. please fix. If it's in any way related to the ranking system as suggested, just wow..