www.rateyourmusic.com C/D?

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.

Pat yourself on the back. Again. And again. And again. And again. and again...

✊💙rush💙✊

This yeah, as a lurker/user/non-contributor I find RYM a surprisingly positive & constructive place on the internet. A lot of the flak it gets seems to be a variation of “the rest of the world doesn’t think genre X is as important as I do” and “Jesus fuckin christ the intersection between prog and metal attracts a lot of dumbasses” which is satisfying and not wrong but also not very productive.

Also, it's ok not to be in love with all musical genres.

I've never used rym, but little has bummed me out as much as looking up my own music on there (although the cure is looking at the reviewer's profile and seeing that they're casually trawling through a huge amount of music and actually love jam bands or whatever).

i don't like patting myself on the back but if it'll goad flopsyduck into trash talking me it's worth it, man that shit is validating

and those little hearts and stuff right back at you austin, thanks :)

I've been meaning to get back into reviewing there but just never do.

I still refer to the number of ratings per album in a band's discography to help decide which I get next. Sometimes that's not helpful at all and sometimes it is a fair gauge.

My ratings on there started with giving 5/5 to my favourite LPs and ended a few hours later with my giving 0.5/5 to a few things I hate. Engaging with it further in an era when I won't buy music until I've heard it and already like it, that just doesn't make sense to me and I can't understand listening to music just to rate it - either your judgement would be premature or you'd waste ages listening to stuff you don't really like, and for what?
I use the site as a directory quite a bit, but that's enough for me.

'Note: This user has not visited Rate Your Music in the past 60 days'

https://rateyourmusic.com/~77ships

Are the rating edgelords slowly going extinct?

I think it's different from that. 77ships' profile reminds me a lot of how I rated and reviewed back in '08 and '09. I think if they were still around they'd probably have more interesting things to contribute than this image of 2008 RYM in amber.

I only started using RYM a couple of years ago so I'm still a little taken aback when I come across these kinds of profiles. I guess it does have museum-like value.

just registered and went through and rated some things.

this is fucking boring jesus christ.

we all go through that stage

As long as you don't grant full marks to the most banal recording of Beethoven's 9th imaginable whilst sneering at everything else, you're golden.

xp

this is probably pretty obvious to all of you, but i legitimately don't think i "get it."

You don't have to rate anything, you can just check out people's lists and discover cool new stuff.

but, like. . . that's what i do here.

and you guys are much more fun.

I suppose there is some community in rym forums but it’s pretty much just a tool.

Yeah there's no lack of tedious admin in my life. And how I rate stuff changes every day anyway, I could never keep up.

it’s pretty much just a tool

i know what you meant here, but i like my interpretation better.

As long as you don't grant full marks to the most banal recording of Beethoven's 9th imaginable whilst sneering at everything else, you're golden.

xp

― pomenitul

i mean i dig the fricsay over the karajan but you know, it's not actually _wrong_ for "kind of blue" to be your favorite jazz album

i love this place for discussing music but for finding new stuff, honestly, i don't find a lot of stuff from the rolling threads compared to rym lists. and even though the relative inaccessibility of 2009-era ilx spares us a lot of unpleasant bullshit, i bet there were some good recommendations in some of those threads.

Can't say I agree with the comparison. Kind of Blue mops the floor with Karajan's Beethoven 9, and I don't even hate Karajan (his Bruckner was nonpareil).

And re:

honestly, i don't find a lot of stuff from the rolling threads compared to rym lists

This is true for me as well. There's just so much more to pick from on RYM due to the sheer numbers.

how I rate stuff changes every day anyway, I could never keep up.

I've made peace with that. It's not perfect, but there's some underlying consistency (when I revisit an album I rated a year ago, I'll be in tune with my initial assessment 8 times out of 10).

I pretty much only use it to keep track of stuff I like, so usually the only thing I have to decide is whether to rate it 4 or 5 stars. Generally I reserve 5 stars for things I’ve liked for a long time.

randomly ran across lovelyanimal's rym page again, they use spotify a lot and i don't so much of what they listen to is mysterious and inaccessible to me but such an amazing listener, have no idea how they manage (well ok they use spotify and i don't that probably helps)

For someone who's rated that many albums (26,431 as of this writing), his *15* five star picks are not quite what I expected:

https://rateyourmusic.com/collection/Vadim_Whitefish/r5.0

Black Holes and Revelations only gets 3.5 stars!? he may have rated 26,000+ albums, but I'm willing to bet that he's never ~heard~ a single note of music in his life

And while recording all of Liszt's music for solo piano is an imposing achievement in its own right, Leslie Howard's performances are some of the most cursory I've ever heard.