www.rateyourmusic.com C/D?

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.

Everyone's trying to out-hate and out-avant-garde one another

uggh it's like can they please find something else to pretend to care about besides music

that's so strange. every once in a while I'll do that, go grab 5-6 albums I'm vaguely interested in and listen to them all over a work day, but I wind up not really remembering anything about any of them

everyone with a rym account should be rounded up and put into camps

sorry lj

that's a real 1-star idea

band camps anyway

I think it's like the proverbial sausage making - the individual raters all look like complete idiots, but somehow the sum of these ratings is surprisingly useful.

that's so strange. every once in a while I'll do that, go grab 5-6 albums I'm vaguely interested in and listen to them all over a work day, but I wind up not really remembering anything about any of them

Guilty as charged. Well, sort of. I try to listen to each album at least twice, be it distractedly, before dishing out a rating. Unless I hate what I'm hearing from the get-go.

I’m afraid streaming has made me a very lazy and close-minded listener. In my younger days I’d often buy an album based on one song or even just a good review and give it several attentive listens regardless of whether I liked it at first or not. I’m not going to say I often went from a thumbs down to a thumbs up but it probably did at least encourage me to expand my tastes.

Yeah I really miss that about pre-digital days. The idea of listening to an album once, not liking it, and tossing it aside would have seemed just completely crazy to me. Maybe it was a function of being younger and less sure of my tastes or more insecure about my judgement, but I'd always spend time trying to figure out a way to live with stuff that I didn't like. It didnt happen a lot, but I can definitely name albums that I hated at first but eventually came around to loving, mostly because I kept them around and just ended up listening to them a bunch more.

Compared to now when dismissing albums or even entire artists based on hearing a song or two is something I probably do once a day.

just... you don’t have to rate it.. what the hell

When I first looked at RYM I noticed that all contemporary country albums had a bunch of half star reviews. Like, hmm, did you really listen to that 4th Montgomery Gentry album all the way through after hating the first 3 so much?

personally, I thought the first 13 U2 albums were garbage, but I'm gonna give #14 a shot

in case any of you haven't already seen it: https://twitter.com/Rateyrmusic

tbh I do listen to tons and tons of music, probably way too much, *and* I even ...rate... albums/singles when I listen to them, but I don't do this on RYM or elsewhere, I just have a spreadsheet I've been adding to for years which serves as a wantlist and also just to keep track of whether I've already listened to something. I mostly just do this during work hours. I generally don't continue to listen compulsively to all of an artists albums if I don't like them though. and my "ratings" are really how much I'd like to own that, it's not supposed to be some kind of objective score or anything. I am Satan.

i mean, that's totally cool. you're not satan. unless you want to be.

definitely Satan. yeah that post may sound more defensive than it's meant to be? just kind of empathising with the raters a bit while acknowledging that mass consumption of vast quantities of music is perhaps not the best way to do things, who knows how many things I've listened to and just wasn't in the mood right then and now I've "rated" it I'm not going to go back to it... argh now I need to relisten to thousands of albums just in case I got it wrong the first time j/k

nah its cool, it’s not even a big deal, it’s just weird when people bring up RYM rankings and stuff as if it means anything other than “how many people have heard of this album”

everyone with a rym account should be rounded up and put into camps

― bookmarkflaglink (jim in vancouver)

you're not the first person to suggest rounding me up and putting me in a camp

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.

― “Hakuna Matata,” a nihilist philosophy (One Eye Open)

you're talking about me, right? like, sure, not literally me, but i've done that, i've gone down the rym list rabbit hole, not on a fixed schedule but yeah i've binged.

i don't see it that way. yeah it was an addiction, an addiction that i never developed a tolerance to or got sick from. maybe the records i listen to aren't that exciting, maybe my enjoying david pritchard's "nocturnal earthworm stew" is evidence that my critical circuits are fried, but trust me i am anything but joyless. i enjoyed myself then, even though it was work, i am enjoying myself now.

i'm not doing that now, and i regret it. not too much, but i wish i had the time to immerse myself in that world, to get drunk off music.

I was disappointed to find my estimated number of albums per year is roughly 80. I give most things 6-12 listens. When certain circumstances change I might be able to do lots more albums.
I see a lot of book reading averages but I have no idea how many albums per year music fans listen to, but it's not very useful if lots of those albums weren't given a real chance.

Disdain is where it's at.

I've been looking for an opportunity to introduce the term "RYMoaner" to the lexicon but don't really look at that site enough to properly define the type.

I think it's like the proverbial sausage making - the individual raters all look like complete idiots, but somehow the sum of these ratings is surprisingly useful.
― Siegbran, vendredi 9 août 2019 20:21 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I feel it's the opposite for RYM. You can get around to the albums that appear in their charts through other means (publications etc), the jewels are all to be found on individual profiles and carefully crafted lists.
Completely agree about the random, joyless and disdainful impression I get from the rym "elitists". I don't want to be too harsh though, I did follow some of them for a while and it was still interesting.

I use RYM charts as a source for finding music from 1910s/1920s etc.

It's very useful before 1965, intermittently throws up good stuff until about 1990, just absolutely useless from then on.

This guy is good - https://rateyourmusic.com/list/bayard

One can amass a sizable quorum of "favorites" on RYM by simply scanning high ratings for more obscure albums one loves, checking that they've rated a sufficiently high threshold of releases with a sensible bell-curve of ratings, then then just ranking based on "friends".

Due to server/programming issues, ranking by "friends" was down for most of this year, and it cut back on my new music discoveries. It's now up, but still glacially slow, but I'd still take its output over most publications (save year end Quietus/Fact roundups).

Not RYM, but watching this Scaruffist adjust his ratings by .1 has a certain morbid fascination for me:
https://www.besteveralbums.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=19621&start=130

I guess I shouldn't judge. I do sometimes go on RYM and adjust a rating by half a star. I feel like a fool, but I do it anyway.

To be clear with my story above, I wasnt trying to get down on people who do deep dive binges on RYM or anything like that. However you engage with music, if it brings you joy then more power to you. I was more relating it as the story of how I learned the lesson of: listen to music bc you want to, not bc you feel like you have to. I feel like RYM, with its data, cataloging, organization, and potentially-endless rabbitholes, had a seductive appeal to my friend and his personality type, but was a net negative for his emotional relationship with music - I think he ended up listening to music just in order to have something to rate & catalog rather than the other way around.

When I was a regular user, I got a lot of mileage out of the method sanpaku mentioned above, it was definitely my main way of finding out about new music in my wheelhouse and the hit-to-miss ratio was pretty reliable.

this person should be murdered

https://i.imgur.com/eyXx6I8.jpg

no really it's not necessary; the code to figure out ratings is almost certainly ignoring their ratings

I mean you're not wrong -- I'm not a fan of users with wacky rating systems, but I can generally shrug it off and remind myself that everyone engages with musical differently and that it's unreasonable to expect everyone's ratings to form a perfect bell curve

...but this guy literally only gives 5 stars to albums he's never listened to, despite the fact that he could use the wishlist function for the exact same purpose without mucking up the overall ratings. murder might be a little extreme, but I feel like he at least deserves the Barbara the Basin penalty

https://i.imgur.com/rpznGHr.jpg

I'm slightly alarmed that my own wishlist has 547 items on it. I don't even rate music anymore, I just wishlist shit that I'll probably never find the motivation to listen to

i appreciate people who game the system over at rym. fuck that site, honestly.

seriously no system is being "gamed" by schmucks who rate everything five stars, their ratings literally do not count

true, but it's possible that some weight is still given to users who rate 90% of their collection 5 stars (or 0.5 stars). the admins have always been a little vague about how wonky your ratings have to be before they totally de-weight your account

true, but it's possible that some weight is still given to users who rate 90% of their collection 5 stars (or 0.5 stars). the admins have always been a little vague about how wonky your ratings have to be before they totally de-weight your account

― hoostanbank de reason lyrics mp4 hd video download (unregistered)

yeah i'm not a big fan of the lack of transparency (having seen how it works out for, say, youtube), though i can understand why they're vague about it - tell people exactly how the system works and you're telling them how to game it

end of the day is that whatever they're doing with their ranking system i find it useful, particularly if i do genre filtering (i like a lot of metal but if i'm going to look for any sort of new music on RYM the first thing I do is filter out all metal, unless that's what I'm specifically looking for)

just today i said to myself "i would like to hear some more acid house" so just did an "everything" genre top chart and listened to the top rated stuff that wasn't by 808 state

i might do better on discogs but i've never been able to figure out how to get useful information out of them, the mercantile focus of that site incentivizes people to just fucking rate everything a 5

fuck that site, honestly.

Why is it so bad and hated?

the writing is awful, the ratings are nonsensical and determined by horrible nerds, etc.

though i just read this review on the page for deftones' diamond eyes and it's the best description of a deftones album i've ever read

The soundtrack to falling in love at the bdsm party

I don't read the reviews and there can be no doubt that its denizens are horrible nerds for the most part but I wouldn't go so far as to call its ratings nonsensical and custom lists can be quite useful for exploring a given subgenre. All in all, I'd rather have it than not.

the lists can be good i agree

idk i just find that the ratings tend to either reinforce received wisdom or punish a record for arbitrary reasons, particularly wrt new releases, which is why i can't get annoyed at all at someone giving 5-star ratings for cataloguing purposes

it's kind of a depressing place imo. certain genres that are not prog suffer a lot bc of the given user base. just kind of a shitty corner of the music internet brazenly indulging in its shittiness. i'm of course there all the time bc when i fall in love with an artist/record i find myself seeking some conversation about it even if the conversation sucks lol

i have no problem saying 'fuck rym (the community)' while still finding the site's functionality pretty useful

they're even terrible about genre categorisation occasionally, recently had people insist to me that the new shura album was a synthpop album (because her last one was i guess?) and not r&b of any sort

That's fair, Brad. I guess my expectations are exceedingly low anyway so I'm likelier to focus on what works.

in many cases the ratings can be useful to get a basic overview of what the most well-received albums by some artist are etc. but for a lot of genres (nearly all pop, r&b that isn't one of a few canonised neo-soul artists or dates from before indie critics started taking it more seriously this decade, a lot of rap that's either too street or too pop for them, etc.) they're completely useless because everything is hovering at around 2.90 because barely anyone has engaged with much of it in good faith

It's terrible when it comes to classical as well but I've learned to just accept its shortcomings and use it only to delve into certain genres.

just kind of a shitty corner of the music internet brazenly indulging in its shittiness

new board description!

I use rym sifting through stuff, the searchability of the database is a plus imo. And I do look at lists, but mostly when it comes to niche or nichest-niche microgenre sorting desires.