www.rateyourmusic.com C/D?

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.

I unironically love all the weird niche lists like "Wisconsin Artists with Unnecessary Repeating Letters in Their Names"

The soundtrack to falling in love at the bdsm party

― american bradass (BradNelson)

off-topic, this is sort of my worst nightmare and the key reason i've always avoided bdsm parties

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

― american bradass (BradNelson)

ah shit you've hit a sore spot for me, i am kind of a horrible nerd? if we're talking about the sort of people that whiney likes to attribute all the evils in the world to on a regular basis (sorry for bringing you into the conversation whiney you've just done it enough that it bugs the shit out of me on a long-term basis)

when i started using the site i was a crappy music critic and a shitty know-it-all with a chip on my shoulder against "professional critics" and an unhealthy obsession with progressive rock, and the site was totally perfect for me at that time.

i feel like the site has changed along with me. maybe i haven't changed that much, maybe the site hasn't changed that much. i haven't written a review there in months, but i like it, i'm fond of it, i'm glad it's there.

rusho i am def not talking about you. maybe former you if you were a know-it-all, website is still lousy with empty lazy dismissals of music that the users haven’t engaged with or are clueless about which is not a pattern of behavior i associate with you

there are many good users though, for example JAMOOL

I have had great success in finding new (to me), good music in genre charts.

Jangle Rock/Pop,
Art Rock/Pop,
Prog Rock/Pop, Jazz Rock/Pop,
Prog Rock/Pop,
Experimental Rock/Pop,
Noise Rock/Pop,
Lo-Fi Indie,
Post-Punk,
Power Pop,
...

A broader question one might ask is: what's the ideal ground upon which to build a genre-specific canon? 'Aggregating individual scores dished out by a legion of horrible online nerds' isn't the worst way of going about it tbh, if this exercise is to be maintained at all. Unless other websites are conspicuously better at it, in which case please point the way!

If I felt like I hated people or cliques pushing their music taste as "the one and only" I would order the intrusiveness as follows: P4K>ILM>RYM

brad summed it up pretty well why i dislike it so, but i will add one more thing: the stinginess of the ratings really does bug me. the fact that there are admins monitoring users and deeming their ratings inadmissible is just stupid. it's like the whole place is a ratings police curating and reinforcing the same old bullshit that's been forced on music fans since the advent of the "music critic" and i hate it so very much.

and besides, it's usually just the same things getting the same kind of ratings as any other outlets. it's worse there though because it's especially groupthink-y and obnoxious.

going to start an "irrantionally angry: ilm edition" topic now lol

last I checked ILM has plenty of group-thinky polls. the difference with rym is that you can click on the results to quickly get more info on an album before you decide whether or not you want to listen to it: emotional descriptors, additional genres the album falls into, etc...

nobody's contributions are ever deemed inadmissible on ilm.

imo, a great music critic isn't better than a conglomerate user score. they're both going to be terribly subjective but at least a conglomerate site has quicker navigation.

quicker navigation can get fucked, i reckon. musical cliff's notes suck.

plus I don't like to read things by people trying to explain why something is subjectively good

you might like that kind of shit but I don't

what

I don't like to read things by people trying to explain why something is subjectively good

board description

music criticism doesn't get any better by finding different critics. it is still music criticism

Can't get into this site at all. However, the 'Best of Rate Your Music' page on Twitter is pretty funny. So I guess I'm conflicted.

rym is an indispensable tool for the pan-genre maven

if all of those genres have the word "rock" in them

it's good for hip-hop and pop too

there's definitely an r&b blind spot

it's good for a certain kind of hip-hop. i swear we've been over this.

I don't like to read things by people trying to explain why something is subjectively good

board description

― jmm, Tuesday, September 10, 2019 5:58 PM (fifty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

for De Subjectivisten!

there isn't a single trap album with a rating higher than 4

death grips' the money store is not better than every trap album ever made, im sorry.

very, very few albums from the past 10 years average over 4. I'd say that maybe most of those that do are hip-hop though so *shrug*

anyway this is tedious. rym is my primary music discovery portal and ilx my music discussion interface, they have different uses and different merits

I like death grips but they really, really like death grips, don't they?

*discovery/tab-keeping portal

ilx is also for discovery, obv

the fact that there are admins monitoring users and deeming their ratings inadmissible is just stupid.

pretty sure this only happens when like 90%+ of your ratings are 0.5 or 5.0

i don't think it's admins personally monitoring users to declare their ratings ineligible but simply an algorithm that weights the ratings of all users and is designed to filter those people out among other things?

that it happens at all is problematic.

A question for the ~ power users ~ of rym in this thread: have you basically added and rated your whole music collection on there?

xp that kind of system is fairly necessary to prevent abuse (like registering a ton of accounts to try to artificially significantly change an album's rating) among other things, as far as problems with rym go that's not really one imo

Nope. I only started a couple of years ago and have deliberately excluded all classical music from it because RYM is just awful for contemporary composition. If a given work isn't part of their puny database, you have to post it – along with the requisite academic references – to a specific forum, whereupon some dude will bless or curse your submission. Then, and only then, may you add a new release consisting of said compositions, by which point non-remuneration for services rendered becomes tantamount to slavery.

xp

I don’t know what like “3 and a half” stars means so I would always just rate my favorite stuff 5 stars and not rate anything else..

stuff that's good but not great

plus I don't like to read things by people trying to explain why something is subjectively good

― ilm jive mind (FlopsyDuck), Tuesday, September 10, 2019 8:56 AM (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

you might like that kind of shit but I don't

― ilm jive mind (FlopsyDuck)

Well I was already leaning towards it but you've persuaded me to clean up my review of the new Octo Octa album from 77 and post it to RYM, just because I know how much you'd fuckin' hate it if you read it.

I'm having perhaps a bout of hypomanic logorrhea of late so I am gonna try to go on at length about what RYM has meant to me.

When I first got on the site it was mostly a non-judgemental space for me to type in where people would actually read what I had to say. I liked the low editorial standards and that I could say any old shit I liked, as long as it was at least theoretically about music.

The consequence of this was was that I did wind up writing a lot of shit, and that shit was influenced by the wider site environment. I did the pithy putdowns of albums I'd never actually listened to, I did aimless and tangential rambles, I did shit jokes. People really seemed to like the shit jokes. I gave out all sorts of spurious and binary ratings. The site recommended I listen to a Smiths album, and I didn't want to listen to a Smiths album, so I rated all the Smiths albums 0.5. That would teach them. I wanted it to recommend me an album I would actually like.

Over time I figured out how to do that on the site. Over time the site admins changed things to make it easier for me to find music I wanted to hear. I stopped caring about which record was #12 for a given year vs. #13. It reached the point where RYM could recommend more good music to listen to than I had time to hear, and I had no shortage of free time in those days. The genre charts, the yearly charts, and especially the lists became indispensible to me.

Over time as well, the admins started instituting reasonable standards. I started on the site as one of those pig-headed absolutists who thought, in practice if not in theory, that "free speech" was my God-given right to bellow whatever ignorant bullshit I felt like on whatever site I wanted. You want quality writing? Fuck you, I'm doing this for _free_! The fact that some of my worse writing might be, in fact, worth less than nothing took some time to occur to me.

So when the admins started "unpublishing" some of my more obnoxious reviews, I was a little offended at first. What was wrong with that review? It was _funny_! And what was wrong with it was that the site had instituted standards that said, among other things, that reviewing music on RYM was not a matter of making one-liner jokes about records, no matter how "funny" they were. Dave Marsh would have a good chunk of his reviews "unpublished" by the site's standards, and I can't help but consider that a good thing.

Of course there were also the carrots. Occasionally a site admin would feature one of my reviews on the front page, which tended to make me feel good, even if those reviews weren't always the ones I considered "best". At one point, when I was still lurking here, RYM frontpaged my mediocre hot take on Pomplamoose, which in turn spurred some discussion on this site, though once I realized this I went out of my way to avoid that thread.

I hadn't really spent any time there since the end of May. I cut back on listening to a lot of music at all. I said that this was because I listened to too much music anyway, and it's kind of true, my 2018 end-of-year list was pathologically obsessive and unmanageably large, my 2019 new year's resolution was to listen to less music and I'm keeping it. I said I had other shit to worry about and deal with, and that is also obviously true. It's also true that one of the longtime users whose reviews I most respect has the unfortunate habit of saying casually transphobic shit. That's not on the site admins - they do not put up with transphobia and anytime he says something like that the review is fairly quickly "unpublished" - but since we're friends on the site I see it anyway.

Anyway yesterday after a three month break I did polish up that Octo Octa review and post it to the site like I threatened, and I changed my name and pronouns. There were a couple other reviews of the record out there already, which both of which said something like "Solid mix of deep house and breakbeat" and gave it a gentleman's 3.5. These reviews are probably more useful and accurate than what I wrote, which was slightly esoteric and deeply personal, but - and I'm obviously biased here - I like it when people write the sort of review that I wrote.

The way I feel about that album... most people feel that way about some album. I find that feeling contagious, _want_ it to be contagious. I'm on the site not just to hear people talk about the Canon but to hear them talk, in their own way, about the records that are important to them. There's a sizeable subcommunity there, for instance, of people who absolutely and completely love AOR records. Now, as far as I'm concerned, AOR is some of the most terrible music ever made, but these people, who as far as I can tell seem like reasonably decent human beings, really love it, so I listen to some of it, as an exercise in radical intersectionalism. A lot of it I have too much history with to ever love. REO Speedwagon is not going to be my thing, ever. But the stuff I don't have preconceived notions about - records like _In For the Count_ by Balance and Fortune's S/T - I think I can hear what the people who love these records hear.

Long story short, good site with some nice lists and writing that's occasionally better than you'd expect it to be. 3.5.

As far as that review, nobody's faved it so far, but an old friend - who I think is an admin, or was an admin - sent me a private message to say how much they appreciated it. So it was worth doing, I think. The casually transphobic friend, maybe they'll quit being so casually transphobic, or maybe they'll quit being my friend, and I guess I'm OK with either outcome, though obviously I'd prefer the former. It's not really up to me. Either way I may get back to spending more time on that site. Maybe update my ridiculously overambitious, skeletal, fallow List of All The Good Classical Music, which is where most of my faves seem to come from these days.