This paper discusses methods to improve the performance of text classification on data that is difficult to classify due to a large number of unbalanced classes with noisy examples. A variety of features are tested, in combination with three different neural-network-based methods with increasing complexity. The classifiers are applied to a songtext–artist dataset which is large, unbalanced and noisy. We come to the conclusion that substantial improvement can be obtained by removing unbalancedness and sparsity from the data. This fulfils a classification task unsatisfactorily—however, with contemporary methods, it is a practical step towards fairly satisfactory results.