www.rateyourmusic.com C/D?

What is most interesting about it is that it'll take your collection and match it against similar ones and show you the differences, etc. And the recommendation engine is way better than anything else I've used. It blows Amazon's out of the water (for instance, it doesn't just pick the 15 records that you *don't* have by one artist that you said you had one record by, and then say 'Look, buy these, stupid!')

Granted, the site is lacking in some features and is slow as molasses, but I give it a big thumbs up regardless.

This was totally worth the time, if only to find out that I need Cowboy In Sweden and Secos & Molhados--two albums I didn't even know existed.

Because it is better. "Tales" is underrated, although not among true lovers of prog rock at its most pomp and symphonic. And I have never given a damn about lyrics anyway.

They should steal the rating system from Launch, where anytime you see the name of an artist, album, or track, you can click on the five-star scale to rate it without having to click through two more pages.

The ratings *system* doesn't suck, it's that the *implementation* of it sucks (clicking two/three pages to rate something). I'm sure it's something he's going to fix soon. The database has some good data in it so far, but it needs a lot more people to get involved. I agree, until he makes it easier to just do the 'one click' rating, a lot of people won't bother.

Making an ILM user list - please post your account name! (me: xox)

-- Keith C

so, is this fixed yet? I don't have the patience to even start the process, but otherwise a nice site!

conclusion:
Dud.

classic if you are a teenager who likes metal and emo maybe.

If I bring up 14 Joni Mitchell albums I own I *should* be able to just run down a list with checkboxes/javascript shouldn't I?

And there aren't any kind of Winamp/iTunes plugins? to automatically add stuff to your profile? What are these people on?

How would this work in RYM's format? Sounds like last.fm, which you can add to the now playing field of the profile.

What are these people on?

The site is mainly run by one person (in his free time). Not to make excuses for the site, but suggestions for improvements are taken all of the time.

The go! page is a little faster for rating groups of albums.

It's just that I'd actually like to put my own collection on there but find the length of time it's going to take utterly daunting, and potentially RSI inducing... unless I do it incrementally over a period of months... and then it doesn't feel like fun anymore, but work :/

I did see that go! page earlier, and it's useful, but even that still has unnecessary actions - one to select the album, and one to claim it, why?

The site looks great, and is quick but I'm baffled at how low down the priorites the ease-of-use factor seems to be for one of it's main functions.

I guess the problem is the cataloguing nature of the site. When you click on an album you usually get options for format (cd, vinyl, digital, etc.) and sometimes half a dozen versions (various regions, reissues), with options to rate and review. A compromise could be to just select the default version and n/a for format (with just check boxes?). I'll see if this has been suggested. Are you wanting to rate them?

Thanks for considered answers to my not very carefully considered beefs btw! :)

Perhaps searching for artist and format could be done initially to filtering the choices? Country of origin even, I know (for instance) that 90% of my Björk records would be One Little Indian (UK) and not Elektra (US & Other) releases.

The creation of personal lists is a different function from cataloguing what's in your collection. However the list format may be a simpler and more convenient method of presenting your music interests by year anyway, and you can still place notes / personal reviews on the list pages.

I don't use the rym website for personal ratings, so i am the wrong person to ask about these features.

Check out the singer on the cover. That's your expression that is - when you listen to this album.

I've never even LOOKED at the message boards so I don't know about those. I've also never paid much attention to the general rankings (this record is ranked #17 for 1988, etc., though the SINGLES ratings can be interesting.) I just look up (and rate, sometimes even review) the stuff I like and then sometimes look up other people who like the stuff I like and see what else they like (and take notes if it's something I've never heard or maybe gave up on).

Also, I like the reviews. But then I tend to prefer "real people" music reviews (especially when they're short and to-the-point) over reviews from professional critics. And the reviews on RYM are, I find, a little more varied than those on Amazon. Amazon reviewers tend to be either gushing fans or venomous haters. There's more middle ground on RYM, I find.

http://rateyourmusic.com/~JasonHernandez

So this + wikipedia (and amg I guess) basically makes Discogs obsolete, no?

like Woolworths makes HMV obsolete?

seriously, NO.

I like rateyourmusic fine but it is anything but thorough, detailed, informative as any kind of online catalouge.

Especially so for the kinds of music (dahnce) that don't tend to be consumed in an album format.

AMG made itself obsolete...

I may have been bitching unfairly upthread btw. It DID look like an incredibly daunting process at first but (if you're fast with keyboard shortcuts & window tabbing & can get iTunes to fart out some kind of text list in advance...) I actually found it pretty easy to get my collection on there in the end. ok I needed a spare afternoon but yeah, it's got some fun features and some moderately useful ones too.

The update has certainly made RYM a bit more user-friendly.

Speaking of the overall lists, I guess the weakness is that bands with a very lojal fanbase are becoming a bit overrated. People who couldn't give a fuck about Grateful Dead, Rush, Elvis Presley, Guns'n'Roses, Michael Jackson or Kiss usually don't bother rating their output, which means their (often fanatical) fans are the only ones who rate their albums, giving them a very high position in those overall lists because most of their votes are from fanatical fans.

(Michael Jackson has enough haters the effect isn't quite the same as with the others though)

fandango, I read yesterday the site creator is tinkering with a way to upload lists to RYM in different formats. too late for you I know.

heh. tbh now I've gone through the whole process I can sort of understand why the idea was difficult in the first place!

but it'd be good for users to get a head start that way if poss. yeah and later on sort out things like format, release edition etc if they wanted

I guess I'm not really sure what Discogs offers that Wikipedia does not in terms of detail--yes there is plenty on Discogs that is not on Wikipedia but most of it could be transferred, since the data is factual--no copyright issues. And then Discogs is proprietary, though of course w/Wikipedia you've got the vandalism issues. But the ratings/comments features in Discogs seem far less developed than in RYM, and RYM provides export of data, and there is some attempt to account for variant releases... Discogs has the shopping thing--but who cares? I already know where to shop for music online. Basically I'm thinking about contributing/cataloging and trying to figure out which is best.

xpost: More like Target makes KMart obsolete.

i use discogs (mostly to get info on dance releases I want to add to the rym database) but it just seems poorly laid out. For certain genres, it happens to be where the action is for now but I don't see what it does as good or better than RYM.

So there's 10 more years of data since this thread was last updated. I find RYM quite useful as a gauge for where to start with a new artist and an interesting look at general consensus for artists I like. But I'm sure there's issues with the site: confirmation bias, a general trend towards rating early work much more highly than later work (which may be justified, of course, but often is for other reasons), a general regression towards the mean, etc.

A comment about Wire's ratings over the last ten years being mediocre inspired this revive. Compare with Killing Joke, who've been around a similar amount of time and whose ratings are pretty consistently good.

The usefulness of RYM ratings has definitely improved over time, and you quickly learn to filter out all the wildly overrated prog.

As a music discovery tool it's fantastic, I find way more interesting stuff by clicking/filtering through RYM than through ILM, webreviews or Spotify, especially from outside the Anglophone sphere.

looking at you, cigarettes after sex, the worst band in the world

I’m pretty much the same. I don’t actively seek out music I’m unlikely to enjoy so most of my negative ratings are for hyped releases I want to dis numerically (‘cause I can’t help but check some of them out) and disappointments. I also only recently resumed rating stuff after deleting all of my stars a while back so the overall grading scheme skews even more heavily than usual toward the upper end, since I started by re-adding almost every single 4.0+ album I can think of. A couple of years should correct that tendency, though.

I don’t actively seek out music I’m unlikely to enjoy

yeah i put my time in on RYM and one of the main life lessons i learned was that its pretty easy to avoid hearing a lot of music that you hate. anyone with a significant amount of 1 or .5 ratings is automatically suspect imo. i also made a point to not rate anything without posting a review as well, so a lot of stuff that i didnt have a coherent opinion on other than realizing right away that i hated it or it was Not For Me, i wouldnt bother rating it, just move on, so after thousands of ratings i feel like i probably had vanishingly small amounts of 1s and .5s.

Yeah, that’s a solid policy. I only rate something 3.0+ if I’ve heard it at least twice. For lower ratings, life’s just too short, so I don’t bother giving them another spin in most cases, unless it very clearly feels like I’m missing something essential that I could grasp some day.

For instance, if we stick to last year’s chart toppers, I generally like Fiona Apple and clipping. so I felt the need to hear their latest at least twice before giving them a middling rating but I don’t care enough for Lianne La Havas’s blandcore to revise my opinion.

Lianne La Havas’s blandcore

this marks the official opening of EOY hostilities and I am so here for it

I’m sad to report that I’ll be sitting out this year’s main ILM poll so you can expect the rollout’s positivity quotient to shoot up by at least 200%.

i have some bugbears, possibly

la havas is great imo, clipping was equally enjoyable. i can't handle fiona apple for some reason.

La Havas and Apple are both easy to like, it's Clipping I can't seem to handle.
For all the dud responses, it seems a lot of ILXors have an account on RYM. A list would be nice. That way we can generate a Top of the year and also cancel all the polls.

My EOY picks (still in progress for a couple of more weeks):

https://rateyourmusic.com/list/pomenitul/2020-highlights-in-progress/

xp haha. Like some others here, I just use it as a listening log. For that: Classic. Only when the poll here comes around do I really look back, re-listen to more things and try to sort it all out. I don't treat rating seriously (that would mean multiple listens before I've "logged" anything). If I just make it to the end of an album it's getting at least a 3. I've got many 4's to sort out for the poll.

https://rateyourmusic.com/list/o_nate/best-music-of-2020/

still in progress

Am I just a bit slow catching up with a recent design tweak? Quite like it. (As someone who predominantly uses it for search I've been screaming for a larger search box for ages.)

It came into effect like 3h ago, so not slow at all! I quite like it too.

I figured it must have been fairly new but one can never be sure...

looks nice but uh...how do you edit your reviews now?

Hmmm… looks like that's no longer an option.

good to see it's not just me

I know shitpost-style reviews would get unpublished and you'd be barred from trying to review that album again, I figured maybe they thought my reviews were so good that they didn't want me to ever change them

Ratings as of this writing: 73,041

How.

https://rateyourmusic.com/~Vivnm

I think by clicking on those little stars

The 'dominant rym userbase' is difficult to define, from my perspective there's not a group of popular core users like there was 10 years ago, now it feels like a more much bigger fragmented userbase in its place. In that time it has felt like has been a shift towards more 4chan/reddit users but you could argue that that is generally true of discussing music anywhere on the internet (except here?!). The shoutboxes were a nice idea imo and on the less popular releases they're actually home to some reasonable chat, it's obviously much worse on the popular/hyped releases.

I agree it's awful for classical music and there's a lot of electronic music missing still (but has gotten much better). The amount of users following hip hop on there has improved massively, thankfully it's not just me and 2 other users adding regional rap and everyone else listening to boom bap anymore.

I barely interact with the main userbase, the improvements the site has made over the last 5 years or so has meant that I can just rely on following artists/labels and users I have some commonality with, which is brilliant because I don't have to work so hard to keep up with everything I'm interested in.

They should ditch the Sonemic idea.

I barely interact with the main userbase, the improvements the site has made over the last 5 years or so has meant that I can just rely on following artists/labels and users I have some commonality with, which is brilliant because I don't have to work so hard to keep up with everything I'm interested in.

This is exactly how I approach it and why RYM is totally classic.

Not a big fan of recent design change. Search engine doesn't seem to work as well and dropped filters etc in the process. So now instead of having to/being able to select all releases or whatever it now seems to just search everything from what you've entered and then list them in categories. Not sure if it lists as much.
Seems like a bit of a backward step. Is it an improvement at all?

You can still filter, just click on the empty search bar and there's a downwards arrow next where it says everything with your categories

Not being careful with film spoiler tags can get you banned, according to rules! Some sites would benefit from a heavy hand but this is a bit weird.

Okay, this review of the new Hold Steady record was great, even as someone who generally likes THS:

Sounds like a boomer doing slam poetry in an elevator. Kinda cringe but instrumentation is ok for elevator rock I guess. Think I will forget about this album in a week.

Did someone say there is a penalty for writing too many 5 star reviews because I've been meaning to get back on but I mostly want to review my favorite stuff which will be mostly 5 stars

aiui— not a penalty penalty, but they stop factoring your scores into the overall average. works the same way for 1 star ratings, iirc.

another reason rym is stupid.

and i tried this past summer. fuck me, did i try. but i just don't have the patience for it.

*too many 1 star ratings

but what's "too many" — no idea.

it could also just be an internet folklore thing that has no truth behind it and every one of those kanye west things i rated one half star actually matters.

how the algorithm works is not exactly known, which I think is intentional because for some reason people really love to try to game it. I've been wondering about this myself since 90% of my ratings are 3.0+. I don't really spend much time with albums I don't like and I don't find a whole lot of albums irredeemable. But I think the "deweighting" applies more to the people who slap .5's on like 10,000 different albums. I haven't seen your profile (are YOU on the ILXors on RYM list?) but I suspect you probably don't have anything to worry about.

how the algorithm works is not exactly known, which I think is intentional because for some reason people really love to try to game it.

the modern world in a nutshell.

(goes to vote all pixies releases one half star)

are YOU on the ILXors on RYM list?

― frogbs, Wednesday, January 12, 2022 10:17 PM (one hour ago)

I didn't know there was one, so probably not. I've barely been active there in several years

well, what's your account

https://rateyourmusic.com/~iamragmar

thanks. I think the plan was to do a custom chart amongst those users and maybe poll the top 25 or something. ILX's favorite albums and what not. but I think I need a few more users.

though I suspect your profile may not affect much :)

you can include me on the list too, username is BradNelson

oh you do have a lot of 5 stars

i pretty much only rate albums i would give five stars to

i assume rym does not factor in any of my ratings lol

Getting all kinds of security warnings and pop-ups I haven't seen until today, this is worrying because this seems like an escalation from all the other pop-ups you need to click away, is this just going to get worse?