www.rateyourmusic.com C/D?

I like checking the current years highest rated releases by genre. It's a good help in part keeping up with things I may have missed.

xxpost:

Well yes, you can get a lot out of the charts if you know how to use them, and you can go as obscure as you want and it's a great way of finding things you'd otherwise miss if you concentrated on the overall charts. But that's not what I was talking about.

Yes the ratings for this decade are seriously deflated. To adjust for this, you have to look at the ratings relative to their time period. When I want to listen to this decade's albums, I filter out albums from all other decades. Otherwise, they get buried way too deep in the charts.

The overall chart is only useful for viewing the canon.

Again, that's not what I was talking about. I wasn't talking about the overall chart since the dawn of time, I was talking about the overall chart for this decade.

usually its best to find a few users you align with and see what they highly rate. I've discovered a lot of good stuff that way.

I've been using the site for 10 years so it's responsible directly or indirectly for 90% of the music I like. I've learned of ILM existence somewhat through it (could be related to afrobeats but not sure).
If you know nothing about music, there are many exciting options of discovery (lists, playing with the charts, finding interesting users), if you don't let yourself get disoriented and can retain some independence. There just aren't that many similar websites so...
Even though the site has diversified since 2003, and become decently accurate, there are still some pretty deep demographic biases, a lot of young american guys, especially on the forums that used to be more lively, and there's a major influence from major web publications. Though quite a few discrete people have awesome knowledge. So it's definitely about how you use it. As far as the ratings go, I find it regrettable that they have leveled out, so looking for high ratings makes sense only for if you want obvious classics. And some genres will never receive considerable attention (reggae, soul, jazz, all things edm, folk etc), or serious esteem (on the pop and dance side), but it's to be expected.
Nostalgia or not, the period from 2007 to 2010 had a pretty exciting dynamic: lot of people challenging (boring) classics and a lot of people defending the (rightful) classics. People were trying hard to open up in every direction. Then at some point everybody started following Kanye West, Beyoncé and other major artists (who I also like).
I'm more into reading these days so that's okay.

okay so where do I start - do I have to rate ~100 albums for some algorithm to suggest users w similar taste? or do I browse popular lists? are there lists you follow that you'd recommend?

agree that consensus picks tend to be boring, following the acclaimed music 2017 albums list is not exactly great for recommendations

used to rely a lot on p4ks bnm system, but for reasons beyond me I don't like much of the music they recommend these days

Users aren't suggested to you, mostly you have to read people's reviews on the release pages and add them as a friend/favourite if they appeal to you. Can't deny there are plenty of users who just spout utter shit most of the time (I'm probably one of them tbf) but I've learnt to recognise names and skip past them.

As far as lists go there are some that I've found a treasure trove but I don't really know what you're into

Oh and you don't have to rate music at all, some people don't.

I like the site and use it to figure out new releases that I should check out.

It has a bias towards metal, which as a hesher I like, even though within that bias is a penchant for metallic genres that I don't love (such as power metal which is really big over there) so that all evens out.

My favorite thing to do is just look at a chart for the current year and go down the list and check out things on Spotify or Bandcamp that I haven't heard before.

thanks for the advice, I'll try and see what I can do with it

I think it's more of an active research tool - as opposed to something like Spotify or last.fm, where the research tends to be fairly passive and the recommendations come to you. Just start exploring; look for relatively obscure albums you like and on that album page, look down the left hand side for which lists that album appears on. Chances are it'll appear on a bunch of 'my top 3326 albums' but also on a 'more albums that sound like x' type list.

this approach seems to be working (found quite a few ilxor lists that way) but most lists popping up were annual favorite lists - kinda boring compared to like, thematic personal (not +1000 records) lists

anyway, thx for all the input

I find it a useful tool.
Helps to find out what lps I don't know yet are like. Also to know what is worth getting from Piratebay etc.
Have seen some mistakes recently, things lie the Ten Years After 2cd series being missing from the releases. Think they came out in 2015. had noticed they weren't up on Amazon either but I have the first couple of them.

But it is a place that I go to quite frequently and it is rewarding to read those of teh reviews I can read for the most [part. There are a load of them in other languages which I struggle with though.

RYM is awesome but it gets a bit hivemindy sometimes, especially when something starts shooting up the year-end charts too fast and the taste police feel the obligation to shoot it down. That's probably the reason why metal seems to rate so high, non-metal fans don't feel the need to chime in the way they would on anything else. Also I find my best reviews getting axed a lot which is a bit irritating. But its still a great site, I'm on it all the time.

Yeah the downrating thing really sucks, e.g. you'll see a lot of people giving the lowest possible ratings to pop albums the instant they are added to the database. And I'm still convinced very few of the people who rated Lulu actually heard it, but I don't think they had the same agenda as the taste police, that felt more like an lol meme thing for some reason.

That being said, RYM is probably the site I spend the most time on these days and have discovered so much music as a result.

These are my two personal favorite lists that I find myself constantly revisiting:

http://rateyourmusic.com/list/Lydfrabaksiden/the_all_time_greatest_records/

http://rateyourmusic.com/list/dotadot/in_a_silent_way__ambient_and_minimal_jazz/

I basically use rym to find the album to start with when i discover a new artist. In that case i go for the highest rated album. If i don't like that one usually the artist is not for me. There are exceptions like talking heads (never got the appeal of "remain in light" but the gorgeous "name of this band" is rated almost as highly) but often this works perfectly for me. The ratings algorithm is quite elaborate, eg it favours albums which have many ratings regardless of the rating itself. Besides that i sometimes scroll through the reviews.

I like RYM, but a lot of the reviewers exhibit one of the most annoying tics of internet prog nerds: treating genres like eternally fixed categories.

okay so where do I start - do I have to rate ~100 albums for some algorithm to suggest users w similar taste? or do I browse popular lists? are there lists you follow that you'd recommend?

What I do is I go to the page of an album I love (ideally one that's not part of the canon) and check out the "lists" section to the left. That shows every user-made list that includes this particular album. So from here I can go and check out these people's lists and find albums that I had never heard of and like-minded people whom I can follow, check their ratings etc.

Additionally there's a recommendation system but you have to rate albums first, obviously.

That seems to be the best approach, yup

I find my best reviews getting axed a lot which is a bit irritating.

― frogbs, Monday, 3 April 2017 16:45

Axed? Do you mean deleted? Never heard of this.

rym is nice but i've found it to be less helpful as i've been trying to get into electronic music for the past year. it's sort of a weak spot in the knowledge base- discogs isn't as navigable for me but folks there know _way_ more about electronic and dance music.

There are some electronica subgenres where RYM excels, like "industrial techno". However, there's a definite disinterest in dance music, per se.

Always found the lack of folk music reviews puzzling. There's definitely lots of folk fans around but surely the really dedicated fans don't all hate computers?

I like to play around with genre/country combinations when filtering the overall chart by getting it to, say, list synthpop releases from Italy or something.

Axed? Do you mean deleted? Never heard of this.

it's happened several times to me - I write a one or two sentence review, something I think is pretty funny, as sort of a placeholder. then later I go to update it and it's greyed out, it doesn't display on the page and I can't update it. idk how many of my reviews it's happened to. at least a couple.

the irony of course being that the short review is probably better than the longer one that I would've written

They have a policy against placeholders or joke reviews?

lol @ this guy's rating system:

https://rateyourmusic.com/~Entracte7

have encountered that person under different usernames. wish him only ill

disappointed they havent written the reviews to match

presence of arditti string quartet is like the canary in the coalmine of a fucking twat

György Ligeti said of Evgeni Koroliov's take on Bach's Die Kunst der Fuge that 'If I am to be allowed only one musical work on a desert island, then I should choose Koroliov's Bach, because forsaken, starving and dying of thirst, I would listen to it right up to my last breath'. I choose to believe that Ligeti the RYMer would have given it a full 5 stars. Entracte7, however, only gave it 4.5 stars (one of only five records out of 13,276 to have been granted this most prestigious distinction), because he's just that much of a monocled gentleman.

Don't you dare diss the Ardittis, LJ.

(I know exactly what you mean, though).

the only rational response is to rise up and violently aurectomise our monocled oppressors

if you go down to 3.5 you get the first sign of rock music: can, talk talk, velvet underground. unspeakably fucking lame

Stop being such a rube and raise yourself to the 4th star via the Ardittis' Neue Wiener Schule cycle (which is indeed quite good but often idiosyncratic and hardly the last word on these works – not to mention that if we're going to be completely honest here, Berg's quartets are more consistently compelling than Schoenberg's; why was half a star not docked from the latter?).

The mind boggles at the sheer amount of dedication that's gone into this gesamtkunstwerk of hate.

Also, that wishlist of nearly 10,000 records he's begging to one star lol

His film ratings are incredible as well.

loving this guy's work

LOL half a star for all the Oasis albums except Morning Glory, which gets a whole one. Clearly a populist at heart.

I wonder if he really listens to all of those half star albums he rates. Either this guy has a real obsession with listening to stuff he doesn’t like or he’s confident enough to give bad ratings based on a very cursory exposure. Normally if something doesn’t appeal to me I wouldn’t take the time to assign it a rating.

lol @ this guy's rating system:

https://rateyourmusic.com/~Entracte7

― pomenitul

fwiw, RYM's aggregate rankings weight rankings of people who rate like that, in his case probably by multiplying them by zero.

Scaruffi's rating system isn't this extreme but there's a similar ethos here, I almost admire the dedication

also lmao at this guy because (as rusho just pointed out) the algorithm is designed specifically to ignore this dude

Apologies for assuming Entracte7 is a dude btw, it's just that anything else seems highly unlikely.

I wonder if he really listens to all of those half star albums he rates.

There's been a long history of frightfully serious young dudes ranking things in that fashion. (And yeah, almost invariably dudes.) Even a decade ago, before I ceased to be a moderator there. Everyone's trying to out-hate and out-avant-garde one another. Disdain is where it's at. That and the ongoing lack of consistency in the cataloguing of classical stuff were major reasons I drifted away. (Though I see that the latter is now much better accommodated.)

Adding new compositions to the database is still a serious time sink, which puts contemporary classical music at a disadvantage. I gave up almost as soon as I began.

people like that make me feel better about the fact that about 2/3rds of my ratings are 3.5 or higher

took me some time but I figured out that you really don't have to listen/rate/review stuff you know you're not gonna like

I learned this lesson by example... I knew a guy who would dutifully download & listen to 9-10 new albums per day, rate them all on RYM that night, and repeat, for years. Albums all seemed to just be random things culled from other RYM users & lists, ultra-obscure microgenres and niche stuff that he seemed to have no independent interest in or engagement with. I think he thought he was casting a wide net to discover new music but it was clearly a joyless compulsion & he never seemed to discover anything that exciting.

10 years later he doesnt do that anymore but, despite being a pretty smart guy, reliably has some of the most insanely WTF opinions on art of anyone I know - his years-long exercise in compulsive listening & rating just utterly fried his critical circuits.