www.rateyourmusic.com C/D?

There are polls on RYM?

They rate. We poll. Always remember that.

literally every rym shoutbox is a TS: pitchfork-industrial complex vs. the fantano-industrial complex

i enjoy ilxor.com bc most of the people here do not give a shit about this

stung by my words, the PIC have only gone and given Dey a review lol

"lowly underlings u may have a 7.5 so as not to upset the Great Chain of Being. now let us gird ourselves for the taytay 9.0"

I was thinking the Steve Hillage band

― Muswell Hillbilly Elegy (President Keyes)

president keyes knows my prog heart

i've never actually heard of king khan before, and now i'm learning about this:

Black Power Tarot
In 2014 King Khan had the vision to celebrate Black Power using the mystic language of Tarot. He chose 26 African American people whom he felt followed a true path of illumination despite being born in a country that was so corrupt with racism and vehemently against them. Khan had studied the Tarot over a decade and was given a deck of the Tarot de Marseilles by Alejandro Jodorowsky while he visited him at his home. Jodorowsky's personal teachings paved the way for Khan to understand the Tarot much deeper than ever before. The mission behind the "Black Power Tarot" was to add a heavy dose of surrealistic mythos to American history by replacing the archetypes of the major arcana with the chosen people thus giving the world a new deck. Khan shared this vision with Belfast artist, Michael Eaton who then came up with the drawings. Khan provided him with many specific design instructions to stay true to the sacred geometry of the Marseilles deck, so that this deck could be used in the same way. Khan then presented the drawings to Jodorowsky, who was asked to approve of each one. Jodorowsky approved 17 of the 22 cards in the first round. Khan & Eaton made the proper changes to the 5 remaining cards until they finally received Jodo's blessings and the supreme honour of being two of his spiritual warriors.

which has the better IPA recommendations?

― Muswell Hillbilly Elegy (President Keyes)

answer hazy, ask again later

the rym katie dey score is a 75

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/katie-dey-mydata/

Where is your god now, lj?

as alluded to above!

Saddened to hear what RYM has become, I was mostly there in the late 00s and I'd gotten such a big wishlist that it didn't make sense to keep looking for new music recommendations regularly anymore when I hadn't fulfilled the basics of each genre.

Shoutbox seems like a bad idea.

I don't recognize much of a difference there since the late 00s. Pretty sure Whiney was saying the same stuff about them back in 2010.

Complaining about RYM is like complaining about Reddit. Wherever a gaggle of nerds gather, dumbass invasive opinions are bound to sprout.

I was on it all the time back then and I hardly ever seen aggressive behavior (it was usually metalheads complaining about "hipsters" or elitist posturing if anything). I rarely went to the forums though.

At least 30-35% of the best music I discover in a given year is through RYM and I don't give a shit about Shoutbox, et al.

I don't recognize much of a difference there since the late 00s. Pretty sure Whiney was saying the same stuff about them back in 2010.

― Muswell Hillbilly Elegy (President Keyes)

from my perspective, i was a very different person in 2010 than i am now.

from my perspective, rym _has_ changed. for the better, in a lot of ways. i like a lot of things about it. i use it a lot.

it's not a shining city on a hill. it's not "better" than pitchfork. it does some things pitchfork doesn't. pitchfork does some things it doesn't. pitchfork, too, has gotten a lot better since 2010, although that's hard to judge, hard to measure, because so many things around us have gotten so much worse.

imago is a fantastic person and his opinions are a stew of confounding variables

i read the word "endogeneity" for the first time today and i looked it up on wikipedia and the article explaining it did it in terms of other jargon terms that i also don't understand but that word might have more bearing than "confounding variables".

I spend a lot more time on RYM than here, since I don't have much in the way of insight or expertise into anything I sometimes feel out of my depth on ilx, whereas on RYM I can just potter around lists etc safe in the knowledge that there's far, far worse than me out there though some of my earlier reviews could be bad-tempered. Sure it's full of dickheads but name me somewhere online that isn't. Meme kiddies and weird cranks are easily laughed off and there's a blocklist you can use for especially toxic people.

But it's the best place I've found to really disappear down various rabbit holes either

...to things that are new to you or to stuff you already love (it helps in my case that large portions of the community that are into artsy metal and/or weird Japanese shit)

Anyway, not sure of what I'm trying to convince anyone of.

I sometimes feel out of my depth on ilx

We're all a bunch of dilettantes here, some are just better at camouflage than others.

Find the site quite cool myself. Certainly a great way to find people with the same taste as you and check what kind of music they are digging.

yeah it's cool when you make friends on there and everything they review pops up in your feed. have discovered a ton of stuff this way.

I've started using RYM a bit more the last couple of years. It's dumb to think there's equivalency between the likes discussed here, ILM, RYM, PIC are all different beasts. ILM is by far the best for diving deep into a new, talked about release. But like Pom said, the releases that get this treatment here are more and more of a singular kind or genre. (blabla ilm used to be so much better) One thing I do like about RYM is that it shaves off the hype-layer of new releases. It's the 'wisdom' of the crowd, yes. But it's more helpful than PIC putting a 10 on Fiona Apple while doing a mediocre at best attempt at explaining why except for a zeitgeisty reason. On ILM - and Kate rightfully heralded our great critics - the tendency to declare a new release AOTY five minutes after its release isn't particularly helpful either. New 1975? Aoty. New Jessie Ware? Aoty. New Fiona Apple? Aoty. New taytay? Also Aoty. It's part (ilm)meme, I get that, but it increases hype inflation.
That awful 'wisdom of the crowd' at RYM at least chaves off the 0,5's and the 5's. Since I mostly look at niche genres there (from vaporwave to subcategories of ambient and japanese music, for one) you can actually get a sense of direction and discover some good stuff. The shoutbox-stuff is easy to ignore, too.

Tl;dr: RYM is good not bad for niche genres w/ dedicated users doing the rating; nearly all outlets struggle w/ pop music. Same as it ever was tbh.

New 1975? Aoty. New Jessie Ware? Aoty. New Fiona Apple? Aoty. New taytay? Also Aoty.

*takes notes*

ok, i'll say what i like about rym, why i get more music recommendations from rym than i get from anywhere else

first off is scale. there is not, really, "wisdom" of the crowd here. there is not a voice. there is not a vox populi. every record released is a battle. some are skirmishes. some are wars. these are not, generally, wars in which i fight.

the people running the site set the rules of combat, and they do it without a heavy hand, and they do it, generally speaking, well. the shoutboxes are awful and were, as far as i can tell, created as a release valve for the site's worst shitposting aspects, to draw the shitposters away from writing reviews and allow them to actually moderate the reviews meaningfully. i hope the shoutboxes will go and that they will go soon.

what rym does well, very well, is from an ease of use and design perspective. they have a volunteer community, and the data on releases is not as thorough or as well-maintained as discogs, which has a reputation for being utterly and completely comprehensive - it scares me, honestly, whenever i go on discogs and look for a release and find it's _not there_. that's when i know i am very deep in a rabbit hole.

discogs is great when i want to know who plays on an album, who wrote songs, details like that that often aren't thoroughly there on rym. i can't find anything there. there are no reviews, the ratings are all five stars because they're made by people who are trying to sell the records, because discogs is more than anything else a marketplace.

maybe it is familiarity but i find it much easier to use rym for discovery. i am very fond of the front page reviews, which are not necessarily updated on a regular basis (i'd prefer if they would be, i'd prefer if featured reviews were archived more accessibly), but are well curated, which typicall give me a good idea first of new and hot releases but also of some overlooked older releases.

i am looking at the top ranked 2020 charts again, for the first time in two months, and i have 20 new tabs open of albums to check out. everything is sortable by genre, if i want to avoid "popular" or widely acclaimed records i can do that. if i want to see what the most acclaimed albums from the ukraine albums are, or the most acclaimed goa releases are, i can do that. the information i will get is absolutely _biased_ by the userbase. if i ask a ukrainian what their favourite ukrainian records are, their answers are very unlikely to match up very well with rym's recommendations.

but fuck it, a lot of the records rym rates _are_ good, very fucking good, and they're records that few people will talk about. people here will talk about them, and this is a message board, right? it's not a resource, it's a community, it's a place where people who have similar interests hang out and talk about things. there are some people on rym i like a lot, some people whose reviews i respect a lot, and there is a lot of noise, and rym is useful because it gives me the tools to filter its data set to give me more or less what i am looking for.

I think these analogies with “wars” is reading too much into it - in the end RYM just reflects what music enthusiasts like. And people-super-into-music have never really taken teen/celebrity culture seriously, and had fun putting it down. A generation ago few people took New Kids On The Block, Tiffany, Modern Talking, Wham or 2 Unlimited very seriously, so why whould kids today do the same with the Biebers, Cardis, Swifts or Malones? Music nerds have always gravitated towards (pseudo-)intellectual prog and “authenticity”.

(people didn’t take...etc)

I think these analogies with “wars” is reading too much into it

― Siegbran

well, maybe it's overblown, mainly what i want to get is that there is no "reconciliation" or "consensus" reflected in the rankings - the constant fight between the 5.0s and 0.5s is merely a more extreme version of how records actually get rated on rym. people are incredibly invested in making sure that as many other people as possible like their favorite records and, equally, that as many other people as possible _dislike_ the records they dislike. here, we have a dedicated thread for that and i spend a great deal of my time here gently chiding its chief instigator.

So here's a problem I have, OK? Here's a problem. I looked at RYM's chart of 2020 albums, and I opened a couple dozen tabs, and I went to check some of them out. I can do that from within the browser, they have an embed to Bandcamp from within the browser on a lot of them, and I think that's really cool. It's incredibly easy and convenient and I think Bandcamp is a great site. And I put on a demo record of Machine Girl's and it's some extremely interesting and creative stuff and maybe some of it gets a little darker than I want to deal with right now so I moved on.

And I moved on to this singer-songwriter named A.A. Williams who released her first album earlier this month, and I click on the Bandcamp link, and the first song is titled "All I Asked for (Was to End It All)", and that's what it's about, as Talking Heads would say.

It's a beautiful song, wonderfully performed, extremely honest and direct, and the things that Williams says in that song are things I've said to myself over and over and over again, things I've heard from people I care about over and over and over again, and in 2020, I hear them more and more often. And I am alive, still, and I am working really hard to stay that way, and some of the people I care about are not.

What am I going to say? Fuck art, reducing suffering is all that matters? The hell with that. The hell with that.

And on RYM, well, I'm not going to say anything at all, because it has very well-intentioned standards about what is appropriate and what is not appropriate to say about an album, and what I want to say whenever I hear an album like this, which in 2020 is more and more often, is "For the love of God, don't kill yourself, you are valuable, you are loved, you are worthy, _we need you_." And that is not a review that's written to a standard whereby it is publishable on RYM.

I don't blame Williams for saying what she has to say. I don't think it's in any way wrong of inappropriate for her to speak her truth in the best way she knows how. I celebrate her, celebrate her work, celebrate her _life_.

And I guess RYM celebrates her too, in their own way, by ranking her album, as of the latest charts update, the 162nd best album of 2020, with an average rating of 3.49 out of 5.0 from 191 ratings. Its primary genres are "Post-Rock" and "Singer-Songwriter". Its descriptors are "melancholic, longing, atmospheric, female vocals, male vocals".

Melancholic! Galen would be so fucking proud.

I haven't browsed RYM much, but I think I'll make an account there just as sort of a listening log kind of thing. But this is confusing now as they're planning to change to "Sonemic" which is in beta. Has anyone used that? Am I better off just signing up there instead?

https://rateyourmusic.com/wiki/RYM:Sonemic+FAQ
https://sonemic.com/

damn, when i thought the website couldn't get uglier

i guess it does or will include last.fm-style scrobbling, which is not what I've got in mind as far as logging what I'm listening to (too many different sources...and levels of inattention on my part). Anyway if no one has tried Sonemic I'll give it a go later today and report back.

Well nevermind: "You cannot create an account during this beta. If you have an account on rateyourmusic.com, you can use that to login. Otherwise, please make an account on rateyourmusic.com now and you'll be able to use Sonemic/Cinemos/Glitchwave when the next beta launches."

Earlier, i didn't even notice the search bar on the top at sonemic.com. Looking at a band page, it's seems the same as RYM... for all I know!

I rate these website titles *

the planned rebrand to sonemic is truly baffling. there's also betas for film & games versions of it that have equally terrible names

sonemic -> cinemos is some wonderful aspie shit, i dig

hope the games one is called like... me, sonic

of the aspects of rym that are very web 2.0, the major relaunch/rebrand that nobody wants, that will probably drive away large swaths of the site's existing users when it happens, and that we all go around pretending to ourselves/hoping will never actually happen... is certainly one of them

the games one is glitchwave

now that is a truly abysmal name, what on earth is the rationale there lol

'we have developed a games rating database and community, and we have named it after a niche, possibly fictional musical genre'

This must be the longest rebranding operation in history, the Sonemic name (and Indiegogo funding for the rebrand) was announced in 2015, I expect the whole thing will be slowly buried.

Neptunian Maximalism album rules btw--makes a great third w the first Obake album & Zu's Cortar Todo

A complaint: why do we have to check a box when we want our reviews made public? That makes it seem like private reviews are the default for most people.

I thought this weird design choice wouldn't last but it has.

Discovered "customize this page" on the bottom... hides all reviews forever. This site rules now.

A major problem with the development of Sonemic is that they're taking the suggestions from the nerdiest of users. If anything buries the site, that will be it. But yeah I'm not really sorry that it's taking them forever to migrate the site. Which I can't explain even imagining all the trouble in rewriting all the code.
They hired a communication person, which is a really good idea.
The site is awesome to be honest, the problem is the demographics. Too young, bad nerdy taste.

bad nerdy taste

Care to expand on that?

I dunno, the maintainers seem to me to be building the site that they want, and would probably need to hire more than a comms person if It's ever going to have wider appeal.

It's quirky to use (Kate otm "web 2.0") but seems to be the best thing around for actively keeping track of your listening. It doesn't touch Discogs for keeping track of a collection, but ratings there seem like an afterthought.

Care to expand on that?
― pomenitul, Friday, July 31, 2020 7:21 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I mean looking for qualities in music that cannot be played in any social setting, a bedroom cult(ure) of the niche, obscure, subculture, difficult, hardcore, maximalist, minimalist, original, novelty. It's a little tiring and unhealthy and not ideal to engage music together. I'm sure others would paint a picture where RYM is painfully safe and middle of the road, which is not necessarily irreconcilable. I'm pretty sure it's a question of age and perspective, I speak as someone in his 30s who is feeling more like consolidating his taste and finding instant jams than lending his ear to everything. But RYM was very satisfying for me from 2007-2012, and I've stayed, maybe it's tough love.