www.rateyourmusic.com C/D?

http://rateyourmusic.com/board_message/message_id_is_228000_and_board_id_is_1

The 'compare' feature is kinda nice, as maybe it will someday turn me on to something great. Nothing yet, though.

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.

It's not just that there's a general trend towards rating early work much more highly than later work in terms of one band/artists discography, but I usually find that when new releases in general are rated over on RYM, unless it's a blockbuster record that has universal acclaim across the board from the off, new releases are usually treated initially with skepticism or more harshly until the album has been around for a while and then you'll see more of a clearer consensus crystallise.

I know it's been explained in some other thread, but how is it again the site can be used to find music?

Say I'm interested in finding great current albums, regardless of genre, could I use RYM?

For example, looking at the overall charts for the decade so far, it looks a bit of a mess because everyone is in such a rush to consume new stuff and not enough time has been spent with the records. It's hard to argue with the overall charts from the '60s up to at least the middle of the '00s, but I reckon it'll be another 10-15 years before the overall chart from this decade begins to make sense. It seems to me that more people are listening to more music than ever, but have become relatively crap at judging it.

(x-post)

RYM is great. It's pretty much a database that allows you to thoroughly explore genres.

Focusing just on the overall charts or scores is stupid. You can go as obscure as you want.

I've always found the lists very useful for finding new music, the more personal the better. I don't really bother with charts because consensus is boooooring.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm consistently astounded and more than a little worried by my inability to even so much as vaguely recall some of the albums I've rated, especially those that didn't make it to 3 stars.

been too busy to check out much new music lately - my default site for seeing what people are listening to now is still rym, though

looks like the #1 album right now is the new black dresses, which i feel like i'm _supposed_ to like because, well, you know, but i've honestly never related to their stuff. much respect to the both of them of course. the rest of it is i just don't even know. the new black curse record sounds nice? but then there's all this other blehhhh metal and records by 40 year old neo-prog bands and "wacky" people like igorrr who play every musical genre SIMULTANEOUSLY, i mean i'm not opposed in theory to a combination of baroque music and breakcore but just saying "hey on this record mash up baroque music and breakcore" doesn't automatically make it GOOD, you know?

and then at #19 rym is arguing about whether black magick ss are nazis or not. they have a fucking swastika on the cover and the "SS" in the logo is, yes, twin lightning bolts. fuck off. seriously, it's 2020, if you can't get your modern music fix out of the considerable pool of musicians who _don't_ put multiple nazi-related symbols on their album cover i don't think i want to talk to you.

A couple of months ago I went ahead and deleted all the ratings I'd dished out on RYM over the years. Listening in terms of stars and half-stars, no matter how noncommittally, lessened my appreciation for music in that it subconsciously compelled me to mimic the would-be equanimous stance of the Ideal Professional Music Critic – an amusing intellectual exercice, provided it doesn't overstay its welcome, which it very much had. I am now back at the point where I simply have no interest in engaging with large swathes of new music touted as worthwhile by the RYM hivemind (among others…). 19 times out of 20 my initial intuition turns out to be a foregone conclusion, and I no longer have to patience to wade through recent flotsam and jetsam only to extract a pearl here and there, or to feel like I'm tuned into The (Small-Fry) Discourse.

As far as the current top 40 is concerned, the Ulcerate, the Spectral Lore / Mare Cognitum split, the Nicolas Jaar and the Fluisteraars are the only 2020 LPs I will undoubtedly revisit. The rest, which consists of ostentatiously 'artsy' pop/rock/metal/r&b/rap, etc. RYM catnip, makes me feel like the smug old coot that I am. It's almost always music by young 'creatives' who are far more conventional than they believe themselves to be or elder statesmen à la NIN who have certainly not made some of the most remarkable ambient music of 2020. And yeah, I too am quite tired of '"wacky" people like igorrr who play every musical genre SIMULTANEOUSLY' – so fucking what, Gautier? All that being said, RYM is still a better place to go trawling for new music than most.

Igorrr is absolute crap tbf, the kind of band people erroneously think I'd like

Anyway, if we're talking the current top 40, before next week's fairly dramatic chartbump-to-be, Slift is absolutely amazing and there's also at least one ilxor you're snubbing :P

Oh yeah, Slift is indeed the shiznit, I missed it somehow.

It's funny, because I do have the opposite stance; I go to RYM because I am an old lady and because I do want to engage with the hivemind, to find out what "the kids" are listening to. Which isn't something I feel like I could necessarily get from Pitchfork? And certainly isn't something I'm ever going to get from fucking Fantano. RYM has certain... flaws in its userbase (psychedelic nazis: #19), but it did also expose me to certain points of view that weren't common among people my age. I honestly do believe there are more trans women on that site than there are cis women, and that's not a situation that I think is ideal, but I'll take it over a site populated entirely by cis dudes.

Most of the stuff that makes my eyes glaze over on the list is music by people I've already heard and dismissed, the elder statesmen of rock music. Maybe the new Strokes album is great - people change over time, it's probably not fair to them that I hear their name and roll my eyes at the insufferable hype train for "Is This It?" and its cod-Mapplethorpe album cover - seriously, how could I ever be expected to have the slightest amount of respect for a heterosexual spin on Mapplethorpe? - and maybe I will eventually check the album out and love it. I will probably not check out either of the Nine Inch Nails "dark ambient" records or the DOOM Eternal video game soundtrack.

Some of the metal I do occasionally check out. Some of it I genuinely do like. There's just this whole crew of people who listen to metal and only metal and the records are everywhere in the ratings, and honestly, the TRVE CVLT METAL people are the opposite of what I'm looking for in music. I'm not looking for darkness or evil or _purity_ any more than I'm necessarily looking for "wacky" joke metal where they play klezmer and sing about hot dogs. I'm not opposed to either of those things. I am uncommonly fond of the Chunktrade demo, which is pure joke metal with song titles like "Zoophilic Prosthetic Rectum Masturbation" and a cover of the "Popeye" theme.

What I like in music is not so easily categorized in terms of genre or style, not so easily put into words. That's why I like the lists, which are sort of a manual way of Glenn's "deep learning" made-up genres, because it's a way of grouping music that doesn't require rational or analytic explanation. I can learn more about a song by listening to the first three seconds of it, in most cases, than I can by reading long paragraphs about it.

The criticism I most like is someone whose taste I trust to be interesting saying "Hey, listen to this!" - and nothing more. The RYM charts are hundreds or thousands of people echo-chambering, but a lot of a time the thing they're sitting in a room and amplifying is worth hearing. I can see why some people roll their eyes at the R.A.P. Ferriera record, but it's the sort of thing I will probably always have a sentimental fondness for, for instance. And even when it's not, even when what those kids are hype about sounds like edgelord bullshit to me... well, it's a good antidote to FOMO if nothing else!

I'm used to snubbing ilxors! I know there are ilxors who make really acclaimed music, ilxors who I like a lot as people, and the music has just never grabbed me. I don't necessarily correlate how I feel about someone with how I feel about their work, though I do try to avoid listening to music made by living human beings if I have seen persuasive evidence that they are awful.

This Slift... and maybe I should take this to your thread LJ, lol, but it leaves me cold. I actually managed to listen to a whole song, and it's not bad, I've just heard what seems like thousands of other records that are indistinguishable from this. Specifically, I'd much rather listen to some old Litmus records.

Au contraire, I think RYM, when used well, offers an escape from certain hiveminds (as well as an overview of the ones that do exist). Witness, as I said elsewhere yesterday, the Pitchfork-industrial complex:

U guys can survey the reviews here - https://www.metacritic.com/music/fetch-the-bolt-cutters/fiona-apple/critic-reviews

― I eat fast foods (morrisp), Sunday, 19 April 2020 16:35 (seventeen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

That's why I use RYM. Everything (more or less) is covered, and every opinion is catered for. Not that many people are making a good fist of critiquing the Fiona Apple. (You think my liveblog yesterday was bad? You should read the RYM comment-box and negative reviews, lol)

an escape from certain hiveminds

Emphasis on 'certain'. Still, it's better than (almost) nothing.

the mere presence of negative reviews is pretty fuckin value-neutral to me if those negative reviews refuse to engage with the material cf. those people calling the fiona record "the ultimate karen album"

also there are way more people in that comment box talking about anthony fucking fantano, speaking of catered-for opinions

"thank god there's some difference of opinion here, even if the writing is garbage and no one knows what they're talking about"

Specifically, I'd much rather listen to some old Litmus records.

Lol I played with this band, unless it's a different one (there seem to be several)

btw if you're constantly railing against certain hiveminds i'd argue you haven't escaped them at all

With all due respect, Brad, sometimes I get the feeling that ‘engaging with the material’ means hearing it the way you do. Which is fair in some sense – our value judgments about art are never entirely subjective... to ourselves.

i mean, specifically concerning lj's liveblog, it was like he was hearing it through the pitchfork score instead of listening to the record or having any real engagement with the artist or what she's been trying to do. fair to hear it and feel unaffected or even annoyed by it but it trips into reactionary when you make it all about this self-satisfied striking against the dominant narrative

also you'll all find this unsurprising but i agree that our value judgments about art are never entirely subjective!

the fiona record is an instance of an artist fully pushing her music into a universe only hinted at on her previous record(s), these are the usual conditions that foster critical acclaim for an already-critically-beloved artist, before pitchfork's branding even enters it

Lol I played with this band, unless it's a different one (there seem to be several)

― varèse désserts (Matt #2)

the one with the mellotron

i think professional criticism has strong positive value. when i was younger i had this sort of zappa-style sneering distrust of "professional critics" as being, you know, this elite cabal of gatekeepers whose tyrannical hegemony we needed to overthrow.

that point of view was, i believe, bullshit. the criticism zappa got was fair and just and zappa wasn't able to take it, and his fans weren't able to take it, but their inability to _learn_ from that criticism does not make the critics the bad guys here.

i would say this that is a sort of thing as "critical hegemony", not in an intentional or absolute sense, but music is a social art form, and so, necessarily, is music criticism. i would say that amateur criticism is of a certain limited value but mostly serves to reinforce alternative hegemonical structures, which insofar as it contains the possibility to promote fascism is not something i'm particularly keen on. my experience of amateur criticism has been of value to me because it has taught me how to write better criticism and, in addition, some small knowledge of how to differentiate good criticism from bad criticism, which is a skill most people don't have much of, to our collective detriment.

mostly i'm wary of this "democratic" notion that anybody is as good at anything as anybody else. even considering there is no true empirical basis for criticism, i do consider brad, for instance, to be a better critic, for their critical writing to be generally of more value, than most of the collected reviews of rym. in a better world the low quality of that writing would be recognized and would lead to a greater appreciation of writing of the sort brad does, but that seems not to be a widespread viewpoint.

Sometimes a dismissive knee-jerk trashing is a reaction to that dismal sense of alienation you can get when your nominal peers are (yet again) unanimously creaming over something you find simply godawful. Well, maybe not entirely "simply" but is it worth digging for the complication if you're not getting paid to dig? I do now and then happily break new aesthetic ground in what I can appreciate but also it's silly to pretend that you can't (at some point) quite reliably know when a thing isn't worth bothering with, or indeed that preferences won from experience aren't, you know, a valid guide to goodness and fulfilment.

is it worth digging for the complication if you're not getting paid to dig?

imo yes! i mean, i feel like it's one of the on-going projects of this board and why this place is more than just people shitposting opinions at each other (some of the time)

if you don't want to dig deeper, that's fine, but why post a knee-jerk trashing like that to the internet? like, where is the benefit in dave marshing all over a record in public?

it's true that the worst thing about rateyourmusic is rating your music

that dismal sense of alienation you can get

My reaction to “hype” is mainly — “I wish the music I love received even half this rapturous praise!” I do try to separate the hype from the material, when I’m listening to the album; but it’s hard to keep your reception entirely uncolored by it (a 10.0 on Pitchfork feels like almost a challenge to find weak points).

Well that is something I find depressing about dismissive one star one line RYM 'reviews' but "sheer upright bass pablum" is good value for money IMO.

xxp

(xp I guess some of the music I love does indeed actually receive half, or more, as much praise... so what am I complaining about, lol)

LOL. Quantitative evaluation has a use after all.

it made me search "upright bass pablum" on youtube because i wanted to hear what such a thing could possibly sound like

the results were disappointing, tedx talks by upright bass players - i mean, good job parsing that search google but i don't actually want to watch a fucking tedx talk - and somebody building an upright bass out of garbage, which i would want to watch but isn't really a "music" video.

really though the best way to find "upright bass pablum" is to just search for "upright bass". i mean, fuck this bullshit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HAGjU9Ldx4

hard to get anything more out of that besides "youtube 'influencers' are trash" though!

Naysaying isn’t necessarily a form of edgelording. There is solace to be derived from the knowledge that other dissenters feel as you do.

xps

that Black Magick SS album is below a 3 now, lol

obviously a good thing to get the Nazi shit off the charts but it does remind me of something annoying about RYM, how sometimes a really good new album in an esoteric style will come out and the fans will jump all over it, then when it makes the charts it winds up getting downvoted by hundreds of people who never would've listened to it anyway. its a fate that's befallen a lot of my favorite albums of the last few years but it doesn't happen to Metal or VGM soundtracks because the general RYM userbase won't go there.

it happens with metal too. it just happened 2 or 3 weeks ago with Sweven who were topping that chart, only to be downvoted by the furious army of fans of the record that was second place by then

"it didn't matter if you liked them both, you had to pick one. you had to fight. in the great Oranssi/Ulcerate War of April 2020, you had to know which side you were on"

n.b. hoping fans of both those bands are much cooler than that obv

any time rym is mentioned on ilx is a dud

otm

any time rym is mentioned on ilx is a dud

fixed.

well then i'm a dud i guess! maybe i should stop going there. maybe i should stop going to youtube too. i haven't quit going to either site and i probably am not going to quit talking about either.

I haven't been there much recently but I have mostly good feelings about it. Didn't realize Pitchfork scores and downvoting was such a big deal.

But I am disappointed to know that people downvote stuff.

i mean i do think the site management are doing a pretty decent job with what they have to work with (constant influx of 4chan people, etc), navigating the social dynamics of brigade-driven culture is i think a valuable skill to learn

3.7 aggregate score

I think with some better algorithms/analysis RYM could gradually strip out all these artificial voting campaigns (both positive and negative), sock votes and troll votes so they don't have an effect anymore. Detect when an account gives hundreds of rap or metal or country releases a half star vote, just flag those accounts silently and don't include any of their votes in the ratings. Detect if a certain album receives a sudden mass influx of low votes, flag & exclude all those accounts too. I believe IMDB already does this, in this day and age of machine learning a site should be able to detect these patterns.

Harder to ban people for handing out 5 stars tbh but I'm all for targeting deliberate downrating. I'm sure it can be tricky to prove though

That's why I don't think bans or warnings are the way to go, you'll only get endless bad faith discussions about proof and evidence as if it's IRL - if the internet has proven anything, never ever engage seriously with trolls online. Just silently exclude all votes from these accounts. If joining a mass troll campaign against Fiona Apple also invalidates your 'serious' ratings, it'll stop quickly. Nobody likes spending time voting/rating into the void.

Nobody likes spending time voting/rating into the void.

you should see ilxor.com

All my terrible opinions from 19 years ago are still there for all to read, some void...

I think with some better algorithms/analysis RYM could gradually strip out all these artificial voting campaigns (both positive and negative), sock votes and troll votes so they don't have an effect anymore. Detect when an account gives hundreds of rap or metal or country releases a half star vote, just flag those accounts silently and don't include any of their votes in the ratings. Detect if a certain album receives a sudden mass influx of low votes, flag & exclude all those accounts too. I believe IMDB already does this, in this day and age of machine learning a site should be able to detect these patterns.

― Siegbran

my understanding is that rym does, in fact, do some variation on this (and may possibly have been doing this before imdb), but it's tricker to implement successfully than you're suggesting (see: the actual imdb rankings)

Oh absolutely I'm sure it isn't easy (esp not as it is happening) but the bigger the ratings dataset gets and the cheaper/standardized these ML tools get, it will get easier in time to clean up the db in retrospect. If there's a desire to do so at all - I mean RYM can also just let all this ratings gaming run wild and not care.

IMDB seems to get a bit better at cleaning up all the miraculous 10/10 ratings and glowing reviews for garbage low-budget/direct-to-streaming films.

Oh absolutely I'm sure it isn't easy (esp not as it is happening) but the bigger the ratings dataset gets and the cheaper/standardized these ML tools get, it will get easier in time to clean up the db in retrospect. If there's a desire to do so at all - I mean RYM can also just let all this ratings gaming run wild and not care.

― Siegbran, Monday, April 20, 2020 6:10 AM (nineteen minutes ago)

oh, sure they could, but they also do have a fairly heavy influx of users from 4chan.

shit gets _ugly_ there. there is a _lot_ of misogyny. some major releases, like norman fucking rockwell, have their shoutboxes deleted because people would go in and post some pretty disgusting misogynist shit and on a popular release like that it's very difficult to keep it moderated. personally i'm not a big fan of "shoutboxes" at all, too much like youtube comments sections. not sure why they were created, but possibly it was some sort of trade-off to try and reduce the number of shitpost/meme reviews - which they have been going through and doing. a lot of my older shitposty reviews have been "unpublished", which overall i think is a good thing in terms of the site direction.

the black magick ss thing is being pretty hotly debated among the mods and admins right now. honestly i'm pretty disappointed that anybody in that crew would be so naive as to argue that they're _not_ nazis, but as far as i can tell it's just one admin who keeps pushing the argument against the better judgement of pretty much everybody else there. we'll see how it turns out; these sort of arguments tend not to have compromise-based solutions.

i think there are a lot of good people on that site, a lot of good people running that site, but obviously they are facing certain challenges.

the fiona apple shoutbox has been tabula rasa'd - let's see if its second chance pays off

the fiona apple shoutbox has been tabula rasa'd - let's see if its second chance pays off

― when I come out, can you introduce me as Jagger (imago)

unfortunately there's not particularly a strong precedent for that sort of thing happening there :(

fwiw I think my experience of RYM is mostly positive b/c I don't really follow 'new music', as in stuff within the Pitchfork/Fantano/RYM chart sphere. I'm one of the guys who votes 25 albums in the year-end polls here and is astonished to see one of them make #68. the 'critically acclaimed' stuff I like with a ton of reviews/ratings tend to be older albums. so I think I'm shielded by the uglier side of the site. that said I do post on the forums every now and then and I definitely get the sense there are a lot of very active users in the 16-21 age range

lol the forums are a nightmare

btw can't hate on a site which produced this masterpiece

https://rateyourmusic.com/list/ELVISPRESLEYAEROSMITHFAN/led_zeppelins_physical_grafitti___40th_anniversary___1975_to_2015/

forums in general are nightmares

this is my favorite web board but it's just a bunch of us middle aged people who have known each other for probably decades now talking about stuff without being interrupted by 16 year old dudes who just discovered radiohead for the first time

i wish there was such a thing as long-term sustainable social spaces on the internet, i'm sad about all the friends i've lost to community collapse, but i guess there aren't long-term sustainable social spaces anywhere else either

Yeah the idea that you can build a large, stable, self-govering/moderating global social space is a dream that already died in the Usenet age.

xpost

The shoutboxes are a terrible idea. I never look a the forums, I can only imagine how bad they are.

Nazi content and pornographic cover art is already flagged and it makes sense for an archival-type site like RYM to extend the (up to now "experimental")

Descriptors

Granular controls to fine-tune your content filters for a new, more sensitive world.

JIMMY PAGE - WELL WE NEED OUR OWN TIMELESS MASTERPIECE

JOHN PAUL JONES - WHAT ? ? ! ! ? ? ! ! WE HAVE ALREADY MADE FIVE CLASSIC MASTERPIECE STUDIO ALBUMS ! ! ! ! !

ROBERT PLANT - LAUGHS HA HA THAT IS SO TRUE

JIMMY PAGE - TRUST ME THIS ALBUM IS GOING TO BE AMAZING

frogbs that is great !

That’s awesome, ha ha

ROBERT PLANT - LAUGHS HA HA HELL YES THE WOMEN LOVE ME WHEN IAM ON STAGE SINGING TO THEM WHOLE LOTTA LOVE

JIMMY PAGE - LAUGHS HA HA YES ROBERT HAS THE VOCALS AND THE CHARM TO SEND THE WOMEN INTO ORGASMIC PLEASURE IN CONCERT

JOHN PAUL JONES - WELL ENOUGH WITH THIS SEXY ROCK GOD TALK WE HAVE A LOT OF WORK TO TOMMORRY AND THE NEXT SEVERAL WEEKS

JIMMY PAGE - I AGREE WITH YOU JOHN THIS ALBUM IS GOING TO BE A HUGE CLASSIC I BELIVE SOMEDAY SOME GUY WILL BE MAKING A 40TH ANNIVERSARY LIST OF PHYSICAL GRAFITTI

imo this is the one guy who's allowed to have 95% of his ratings be 5s

Why did Fiona Apple suddenly end up on 4Chan's radar? I didn't realize she was still doing well.

Is it just 4Chan people doing this downvoting stuff? Has Vox Day became a singer and decided that he's more popular than Fiona Apple?

a girl got a 10 from Pitchfork, that's all you need to know

You never know with them. I don't understand why there's a ton of un-ironic Brie Larson worship on 4Chan.

RYM has Apple's album at 4.01 (Out of five) with 6 thousand some ratings. Seems like she's doing pretty well.

the fiona apple shoutbox has been tabula rasa'd - let's see if its second chance pays off

― when I come out, can you introduce me as Jagger (imago), Monday, April 20, 2020 6:52 AM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

looks like it's gone for good

it was dreadful, and f4ntano giving it 7/10 broke the floodgates for some reason. even without the shoutbox the negative reviews are making me want to like the album more. so i'll return to it soon lol

looks like the #1 album right now is the new black dresses,

this album is at #302 now, five days later btw

is that above or below the psychedelic nazis

Currently #926 so the algorithm works, sort of.

otoh sewerslvt at #26

mind you i haven't heard it because WHY THE HELL WOULD I PUT MYSELF THROUGH THAT?

I'm guessing there's a backstory to it? I heard the album context-free and thought it was pretty cool, but I won't be coming back to it. Not for any heart-shattering reasons, mind you.

Ok I just read an RYM review that explains it, and I… didn't hear any of that at all. Chalk one up for the school of thought according to which music is terrible at expressing specifics (cue Debussy titling his Preludes post hoc).

well i haven't heard it but some of the trans-related music i've heard has been very... high context. there's certain shared experiences a lot of trans people tend to have, experiences that cis people tend not to have. i've heard music referencing those shared experiences that i've found extremely powerful but which some other people, including other trans people, have found opaque or unclear.

I wonder how much of it would pass a blind test. Like, I'm utterly incapable of hearing Beethoven's Pastoral (the classic example) without visualizing frolicking sheep and the like, but I've never not been aware of its subtitle and its programmatic aims. Perhaps there's a real synergy in such instances, but it requires a key to be made thoroughly audible, a key that is usually of a verbal, explicative nature. I'll listen to the Sewerslvt again in light of what I now know about it.

Since it's completely unclear to me (a random dilettante who stays as far away from 4chan/trigger/troll/etc culture as I can) if Sewerslvt is some anonymous dude in a basement, an actual trans woman with real issues or an online group of pranksters laughing at our gullibility, I find it impossible to have any opinion on the artist/subject matter except scepticism. I can only judge it from a musical viewpoint, which is atmospheric D&B (which is something I'm into) made by a competent producer(s?), with on-the-nose depression/suicide samples. Taken at face value, I like it.

I think rather than being descriptive titles often work best as prompts to evoke and send your thoughts a certain way that synergises well with the music, suggesting context for listening

I don't know any of the backstory to the Sewerslvt album. I assumed RYM was into it because there was an anime figure on the cover.

Since it's completely unclear to me (a random dilettante who stays as far away from 4chan/trigger/troll/etc culture as I can) if Sewerslvt is some anonymous dude in a basement, an actual trans woman with real issues or an online group of pranksters laughing at our gullibility, I find it impossible to have any opinion on the artist/subject matter except scepticism. I can only judge it from a musical viewpoint, which is atmospheric D&B (which is something I'm into) made by a competent producer(s?), with on-the-nose depression/suicide samples. Taken at face value, I like it.

― Siegbran

ok, stop! let's just stop right there. there's some kind of problems implicit in your, uh, skepticism.

first off, there is in fact no difference between "some anonymous dude in a basement" and "an actual trans woman with real issues", assuming that so-called "anonymous dude" identifies as trans. you're talking about the same person here.

as far as your "online group of pranksters" theory i'd just not spend time thinking about it. the choices here are that some assholes are laughing at you or that a trans woman is going through real pain and expressing that through her art. if you choose to believe that some assholes are laughing at you and that you can therefore be "skeptical" or otherwise decline to engage with the work on anything other than a purely aesthetic level, you run the risk of dismissing the trans woman who is going through real pain and expressing that through her art.

my personal attitude is to judge everything someone says as if they mean it. maybe this is extreme but i've seen enough people "joking" about suicide that it seems like the most compassionate course i can take.

I don't know any of the backstory to the Sewerslvt album. I assumed RYM was into it because there was an anime figure on the cover.

― Muswell Hillbilly Elegy (President Keyes)

the dismissive putdown is that some trans women are dismissed as "male-to-anime". personally i don't think any trans or gnc person deserves dismissive putdowns, but unfortunately the putdown does cut to the heart of a lot of the challenges certain trans women face.

I meant I did not know that Sewerslvt was trans and that when I saw the anime character on the cover it fit in with RYM's usual obsessions: anime/video games/Asian pop etc.

wrote up my thoughts. not something i could publish on the site itself - they have rules for what is publishable, and i believe they are reasonable rules - but i feel ok enough about it to paste it here.

Transition was a difficult and drawn-out process for me. One of the more difficult aspects was that the spaces I socialized in were spaces that, in practice, excluded cis women. This made it easy for me to think of women as unattainable, alien, Other.

I don't spent a lot of time ruminating on what I would have done differently, because I have so many _other_ things to ruminate on, because the nineties were a different time, but I do allow myself some regrets. One of those is that I wish I had spent more time listening to women. Once I started listening to women, really listening, it became possible for me to understand that they and I were not quite so different than I had assumed.

I feel this is perhaps not an uncommon experience among trans women, that it is perhaps an artifact of being raised male. A certain popular interpretation of (cishet) masculinity teaches men to avoid women for anything other than sexual encounters. This practice is damaging to both men and women, cis and trans.

If the only encounter one has with the feminine is anime, well, it's not a surprise that this is how trans women frame their goals. And when your goal is unattainable, misery results.

It makes me sad to see this misery perpetuated, to see it celebrated. Everybody has their own ways of dealing with their pain, and if a record like this helps people live with themselves, helps them accept themselves, well, then there's value in that. And there's value in Sewerslvt having expressed herself, having spoken her truth as a trans woman.

I will say that my experience as a trans woman is not like Sewerslvt's. That I am happier than I have ever been. Everyone I know loves me, accepts me, and values me. I am at ease in my own skin. None of this is a question of being passing or being beautiful or anything like that.

I wish I could say this publically, to everyone here who feels hopeless like I used to feel hopeless. But I am of course not talking about the music at all here, can't say this in a way that will meet this site's published review standards. It's a message I will continue to try and speak, though, as often and as loudly as I can, because this is my truth.

Has there been a trend of trans artists being dismissed as imposter trolls? because this happened in spec fic community recently.

a read of the latest Black Dresses album's shoutbox will be instructive

a read of the latest Black Dresses album's shoutbox will be instructive

― imago

why would you ever suggest anybody _read_ the youtube comments

just don't. rym might have the poor editorial judgement to continue to feature these blights but that doesn't mean anybody should ever read them.

on the other hand, i guess it proves that black dresses really are women if the /mu/ spillover contingent is willing to treat them with just as much vitriol and hatred as they treat cis women. "wow, that's fucking awful, but also strangely gender-validating" is an experience i have not infrequently.

I was meaning supposedly woke people calling trans artists "nazi troll" and things like that when they are controversial enough.

tbf the BD shoutbox is also full of v supportive fans and some at times actually-useful analysis about how (trans) women are treated by the rym public. the 'problem' with BD is that their music is actually amazing so all their fans (myself included) keep voting it into #1 lol

tbf the BD shoutbox is also full of v supportive fans and some at times actually-useful analysis about how (trans) women are treated by the rym public. the 'problem' with BD is that their music is actually amazing so all their fans (myself included) keep voting it into #1 lol

― imago

and unfortunately i won't ever see it because i'm not exactly up to seeing the sort of stuff 4chan refugees are prone to spewing out

gresham's law of internet discourse at work

but hey, the system works, right?

that's entirely fair

it is weird how certain trans artists have been 'legitimised' (SOPHIE mostly, as stated above) and I'm curious as to what the reasons are. contrapoints speaks a lot of the dreaded 'passing' idea, and maybe SOPHIE 'passes' not so much as a ciswoman but as cismusic, if that makes any sense?

xpost sorry Kate for the late reply, I realise your reply deserves one even though my English isn't the best:

first off, there is in fact no difference between "some anonymous dude in a basement" and "an actual trans woman with real issues", assuming that so-called "anonymous dude" identifies as trans. you're talking about the same person here.

I'm aware of that, I was more thinking of the scenario of the "dude in a basement" (or "cynical producer in a studio") does not identify as trans and is just trying to invent a fictional persona that hits all the right controversy buttons, for marketing reasons rather than sincere investment in the cause.

my personal attitude is to judge everything someone says as if they mean it.

I wish I could. My attitude is to do this with personal stories from people I meet in real life or from verified sources. In a complete shitstorm I more or less randomly encounter online, I just cannot do it immediately. Nearly everything that skims to the surface online on unmoderated spaces from unaccountable 'people' is not real. The accounts are not real people, if they are real they don't engage in good faith discussions, and messages are carefully crafted to maximise clicks or outrage (which is why it skims to the top in the first place and a casual passer-by like me sees it). It must be incredibly frustrating to be a sincere individual trying to raise issues or open discussions in good faith on these platforms, in the midst of all this garbage. The unmoderated internet just isn't the right place to be an authentic voice. Raising a voice in a genre (Breakcore/Powernoise) that's absolutely saturated with retarded edgelords definitely does not help. Or maybe it does, bringing the fight to their doorstep or something, I don't know.

And to tie into what imago says re: SOPHIE (or Anohni, or for that matter any other people who are caught up in whatever sociopolitical shitstorm-du-jour), I think the reason she's seen as legit is that even for the most peripheral observer, she is undeniably *real*, plays festivals, works with other real people, does interviews with legit sources. She's out there and can't be denied or brushed off.

no worries about the "late" reply siegbran, one of the things i like about this board is that you can say what you need to say when you're ready to say it. the pressure for immediacy doesn't help me communicate very well myself

before we get any further i'm taking from the context of your post that english maybe isn't your first language, so i wanted to let you know that the word "retarded" is commonly considered very offensive these days. that's a fairly recent change - there are a lot of old threads here that used it, some of which have been edited to not use it, some of which have been locked - so i'm making the good-faith assumption that you just didn't know. please make an effort to not use that word again.

i'm trying to come to grips with what you're saying and i admit that i am having a little bit of trouble understanding. so let me try to explain again what i was saying, and hopefully we're not talking past each other too much.

regarding sophie, what you say may be true. i also, when i look at sophie, see a glamorous, a pretty young woman. i am none of those things. i've made my peace with that, and i work to look good and feel good in my own way, because there are are as many ways to be a trans woman as there are ways to be a cis woman. a lot of people maybe haven't reached that place, though, a lot of people _are_ extremely fixated on the perceived need to look glamorous and beautiful at all times, and i suspect that perhaps some of those values are factors why trans women like sophie and contrapoints are more widely accepted.

my experience with "extreme" online spaces is that a lot of the play-acting such people engage in is an attempt to express things they actually feel and believe but don't feel safe expressing "for real". i'm painfully familiar with the phenomenon wherein an "ironic Nazi" turns out, whoops! to be an actual Nazi. i think that perhaps this concept is transferable to people online "pretending" to be trans "for the lulz".

and the only way I can think to react to that is to take everything everyone says as if they mean it. i don't know how that would play out in your "unmoderated spaces" because i don't really operate in those spaces. maybe the result of behaving like that would be that you would be harassed and shouted out of those spaces. maybe that's a risk you have to deal with.

so how about a cost-benefit analysis? you're going somewhere to have a nice conversation about breakcore, someone says something that makes you feel really uncomfortable. you remain silent. what are the costs to that? what toll does it take on you to see that sort of behavior treated as acceptable, as unquestioned and, really, unquestionable, day in, day out?

Active for slightly more than a decade, racked up nearly 120,000 ratings in the process. Impressive?

https://rateyourmusic.com/~teninchshrimp

no b/c his (it's abundantly safe to assume he's a he) taste is rockist shite that barely deviates from the also-horrible user base's consensus

in his 5-star rating category: multiple beatles lp's and 45's!

in his 0.5-star rating category: beyoncé "get me bodied"

need anything else be said?

Wait, what? 5 stars for the Beatles?

in his 0.5-star rating category: beyoncé "get me bodied"

lol this argument holds no water on my end. Beatles LPs should never exceed 4 stars, though.

Beatles, Burzum, the Byrds

a person with that many ratings can't possibly enjoy music

I just gave a 5.0 to a single called "Now That's What I Jack Off About"

tbf it's better than any Beatles song

giving five stars to the beatles is _so_ 2006

real rym users give five stars to radiohead and whitehouse records

otm

Also, I had no idea that The Stooges put out a record called Дом кайфа.

I am curious what the charts will look like in 10 years, when most users' parents were into Radiohead and Sufjan instead of the Beatles & Floyd

well, look at the 2020 chart, with Jessie Ware at #5 and Rina Sawayama at #28

Also, I had no idea that The Stooges put out a record called Дом кайфа.

― pomenitul

damn, you haven't heard "high house"? it's a classic!

imo the site should honor its name and only allow you to rate your own music

https://images.app.goo.gl/4CMEk2o2QjsS452r8

Turns out I wrote 4’33 without realizing it.

xp

omg how do i get my music added to the rym database?!?!?

i must rate all of my music the most fair and unexciting rating possible: two and a half stars!

unrelated: just loaded up the site for the first time in a long while and among the highlighted reviews was this one for minnie riperton's first album:

It's no secret that I'm a huge sucker for string arrangements-- just check out some of my fives and you'll see the obsession I have with the lushest of pop songs. As far as I'm concerned, this is the premiere sleeper baroque pop album. Minnie puts her best foot forward on the immense, immaculate Les Fleur, but throughout are gorgeous arrangements graced with her soulful pipes. There's not a single dull moment here. This is up there with your Scott Walkers, Brian Wilsons, and Lee Hazlewoods. Maya Rudolph's mom was onto something, y'all.

a ***gasp*** BLACK WOMAN who makes music that's "up there with" a bunch of white men!??!?!! golly, how insightful.

yep, the place can still get fucked unmercifully as far as i'm concerned.

uh, Austin--it's Rate your music, RATE

sounds like that LP is almost as good as 15 Big Ones!

i would co-sign with some of the people above saying that generally the reviews are god awful needledrop-esque pseud shite, but that the general year rating charts actually aren't too bad most of the time and sometimes include some interesting outliers, and there are also at least a few users who make some good genre specific lists that are helpful for discovery

so i typed the above and then saw they've got that new Strokes album at #14 so just ignore me, i'm deleting my account etc

so he clicked his mouse 120,000 times in 10 years

I don't think I have ever consciously read an entire RYM review. get in, peep the genre charts for cool new shit, get out.

Fellow ILMers have written RYM reviews and they’re unsurprisingly very good!

i should start submitting the same exact review for everything, but change the rating.

have it be some real opaque, vanilla type of write up: "the songs here are as present as ever and it truly feels like a revelation."

"An improvement on their last offering."

rymmv

so he clicked his mouse 120,000 times in 10 years

― brimstead

just think of the Cookie Clicker score he could have had by now. what a waste.

Genres
Avant-Garde Jazz, Drone Metal, Zeuhl
Brutal Prog, Tribal Ambient, Avant-Garde Metal, Spiritual Jazz, Drone, Psychedelic Rock, Free Jazz, Post-Metal

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y'all i just fucking can't, imago can you please listen to and hate this record so that you can shit-talk it, thanks

otoh i also found this album on there just now and i'm liking it a lot!

https://youtu.be/aSwkcsxhAoM

is that the genre/tag list for NEPTUNIAN MAXIMALISM?

I just mean, why assume that someone rating an album = they even heard the album

Kate, that album rules. imago gave it 4 stars iirc.

i apologize for bad posts, just being snooty

is that the genre/tag list for NEPTUNIAN MAXIMALISM?

― k*r*n koltrane (Simon H.)

haha got it in one

we need less neptunian maximalism and more uranian maximalism if you ask me

that's a really cool album even if the trend towards beyond-CD-capacity opuses this year is tiring me out

I got a real nice comment in my shoutbox the other day, "its so refreshing every time i discover a new bizarre electronic pop artist youre there in the reviews"

NEPTUNIAN MAXIMALISM is indeed great; I might have given it even more than 4 stars if they hadn't turned the entire final third of the album into some sort of interminable latter-day-Earth imitation

so i typed the above and then saw they've got that new Strokes album at #14 so just ignore me, i'm deleting my account etc

― Hmmmmm (jamiesummerz), Tuesday, 14 July 2020 17:15 (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

the current top 10 is better than any other organisation will muster at year's end, and don't worry canon fans, Apple is still #1

very disappointed that Neptunian Maximalism is a band, not a new genre

it's kind of both

rym quite liking this year's just alright strokes album when they hated the far-superior comedown machine is still baffling to me

I don't usually write reviews, but I just had too for this one. This album is just so terrible. I mean, it’s so bad that it should be banned from your ears. This should be illegal in every country!! This makes your city garbage dumb look like a heaven. This album is just so crap that if it was manure, the amount of shit that it possesses could fertilizer the world 5 times over. But then it would also kill everything because the level of crap in it is just such horrible quality. Even global warming would be like "Dude, slow down!!" because it can’t keep up with this level of pollution!

The point of this is, do not listen to this, no matter how morbid you're curiosity. Listening to this is like committing suicide on music. Just don’t. Just please don’t. Save yourself the pain and hurt this will cause you.

Sounds awesome!

seriously fuck neptunian maximalism y'all need to get with plutonian herd

It's cute that Neptunian Maximalism is getting hate in here when it will almost certainly be a top 10 album in this year's ILM metal album poll.

I think it's really great but a little ponderous which eventually caused me to decide to not purchase it. The only ridiculously long album of late I have the patience for is the Paysage d'Hiver.

I didn't hate it but I definitely regret spending the best part of 6 and a half hours of my life with it

Hah, I thought it'd be up your alley, ultros. What are your 2020 metal highlights thus far, pray tell?

I'll do a roundup in the metal thread in a sec

Cool, thanks.

As much as I agree that the reviews on this site are super garbage, this one of Sun Ra's Atlantis actually made me lol today:

Side A: Welcome to Atlantis! Listen to the music of our people!

Side B: Fuck, we're sinking! You chose a bad day for visiting us.

Have to admit I was a little confused and annoyed at the recent negativity in this thread, but now I've seen some users with anime/4chan/tankie style names and avatars giving negative reviews to dreampop albums and I'm not happy.

I'm still haunted by a review by an anime (which I can't find now) that began with something like, "it's 2100 and I'm a fembot with a perfect bubble butt..." and only went downhill from there. the deviantart containment wall is in urgent need of repair.

Part of the thing that bothers me with these guys is that they're often into lots of surprisingly great stuff but then they love all these shitty cartoons too.

also most of them are chauvinist dicks iirc

xpost - I probably don't have a right to complain about that because I have "good"/"obscure" taste in music but somewhat vanilla taste in music and tv. but I guess I have enough self awareness to keep my questionable tastes to myself (and I'm over the age of 19, unlike a lot of those anime bros)

it's weird that those users are downrating dreampop albums when Loveless and Souvlaki and Long Season are mainstays in the /mu/ canon. I didn't think it was typical for 4chan types to dump on "esoteric" indie stuff

I like some godawful crap too but I wouldn't put it in my avatar.

As much as I agree that the reviews on this site are super garbage, this one of Sun Ra's Atlantis actually made me lol today:

Side A: Welcome to Atlantis! Listen to the music of our people!

Side B: Fuck, we're sinking! You chose a bad day for visiting us.

How does any other site with reviews from the public compare? Metal archives? Prog archives? I don't know many others.

the reviews on prog archives tend to be super wordy and often use timestamps to just describe what's happening in the music in the most literal way

the reviews on metal archives tend mainly to be 90% and up or 30% and under iirc

your average metal archives review is about as good as your average rym review, which is to say bad

I'd imagine many of those reviews are on both sites.

democracy sucks eh

All Music, Album of the Year, and Metacritic all have user reviews. About the quality you'd expect. Probably more boring than RYM reviews.

and yet still more interesting and varied than the critics'

https://i.imgur.com/SXNzIZK.png

professional music criticism in 2020 is a circled-wagon hellscape of desperate assent and absolute fealty to the pitchfork-industrial canon

https://i.imgur.com/iPyejd8.png

RYM is a discourse, a place of argument, of back-and-forth

I think we need a 'rolling 2020 music-related challops thread'. Not being sarcastic btw.

https://i.imgur.com/LPzbXxL.png

the critics do not speak for me and they are not my people

https://i.imgur.com/qMQPetm.png

rym is my people

pfork didn't start reviewing taylor swift albums until 2017 and she's always gotten good reviews, every time you bring up the pitchfork industrial complex you sound like someone who doesn't know what they're talking about

especially in comparison to the uhhh rampant misogyny on rym

"rym is my people"

the rym katie dey score is a 75

i wasn't thinking so much of the score as the 117 (and counting) ratings

oh damn the ultimate metric of engagement

you play yourself by looking at metacritic too

it's just nice to know that someone else cares about the music i care about

obv i know metacritic is far from exhaustive i never visit it usually, just did today to let off steam and make my wack point ok lol

and ftr i liked 'lover' more than i thought i would, i gave it 3/5. it's entirely possible that if the farflung cocteau twins comparisons hold water i cd give taytay another 3/5 this time around

i just don't like RYM getting dissed when it is very often the only avenue for finding out about great music

There are a lot of RYM people who will give anything Taylor Swift releases a 0.5 without bothering to listen to it.

they're obviously awful cunts and that is the price of democracy

taytay stan policy is to return in kind to kanye anyway iirc ;)

xp under my benevolent rule they will be sent to the salt mines for re-education

I remember once messaging some dude who gave an album that I was really looking forward to a 0.5 like 2 months before it was released and I asked him, "so uh, you've heard this?" and he was like "nah I just really hate these guys, can't explain why"

i just don't like RYM getting dissed when it is very often the only avenue for finding out about great music

Adverse reactions tend to focus on the community, which I haven't really engaged with so far beyond adding binge-prone RYMers whose tastes closely mirror my own and reading the occasional quality review by specific user(s) such as [redacted].

and look, yes I know it's metacritic, but 'the critics' have Fetch The Bolt Cutters as AOTYSF with a 98 average rating

RYM also has it as AOTYSF, but at a healthy and debate-laden 76 lol

... man, i've been on rym, nothing on there resembles "debate"

this is marketplace of ideas horseshit you're purveying

yeah there's lots of bad-faith idiotic badmouthing, sure, but there are also a few thoughtful critiques, i'm willing to sift through for them

Calling this "Progressive Pop" is a huge disrespect to Steven Wilson.

^lmao yeah i know, i know

Aside from a few obnoxious reviews I generally find them serviceable. I don't demand huge insights or great writing, I just generally want to know what albums to get. I tend to prefer short and to the point reviews.

As many others have said, the greatest value tends to be the lists and charts.

settled on a 7/10 for new taytay. her metacritic average is now like 94 ;)

yeah there's lots of bad-faith idiotic badmouthing, sure, but there are also a few thoughtful critiques, i'm willing to sift through for them

― imago

i mean, i've pointed this out before, but not all of us have the same luxuries.

This site can’t be reached
www.hateyourmusic.com’s server IP address could not be found.

I don't care about the reviews but I will often look to the charts for the best album of the year and listen to things that are highly rated that I never heard before.

I discovered IDLES that way when they released Brutalism which subsequently became one of my favorite albums and I also love the band.

not all of us have the same luxuries

I get this, and often think about it when I browse less palatable websites, but it seems to me that RYM is friendlier to trans artists than most, at least if we go by the charts. Correct me if I'm wrong, of course.

and yet still more interesting and varied than the critics'

― imago

lj i mean this is really weird. i mean, you know a lot of people who post here are or were professional critics, right? i mean, i've read a lot of stuff written by folks who post here. a lot of it is really good. i mean, certainly a lot better and valuable writing than most of what passes for criticism on rym. complaining about "critical hegemony" makes about as much sense to me as complaining about the hegemony of the intersectional left. "see, look at how much people like this death grips album", and it's a sea of diametrically opposed fandoms screaming at each other, go to a shoutbox for any recently released woman artist and it probably isn't there because the mods couldn't keep track of the misogyny - i mean, is that what you mean by "interesting" and "varied"? rym is an interesting resource, a fun place to find new music, there are a couple of people there i like. hell, i went to the message forums there today, just to check them out, and of course they're unutterably awful, and i still found my way to this fucking amazing khan bootleg i didn't know existed within five minutes. that doesn't make the rym forums "my people". i don't blame pitchfork for not writing enough articles about khan bootlegs, i don't think their failure to so much as mention khan bootlegs represents some hideous failure of what you charmingly call the "pitchfork-industrial complex".

your continuing high dudgeon about pitchfork, in goddamn 2020, in favor of a site whose musical standards are mostly informed by /mu/ and the fantano-industrial complex, frankly baffles me.

I get this, and often think about it when I browse less palatable websites, but it seems to me that RYM is friendlier to trans artists than most, at least if we go by the charts. Correct me if I'm wrong, of course.

― pomenitul

yeah seriously i am still on rym all the fucking time, don't get me wrong

Now I'm tempted to poll the Pitchfork-industrial complex vs. the Fantano-industrial complex.

which has the better IPA recommendations?

this fucking amazing khan bootleg

King, or Nusrat Fateh Ali?

I was thinking the Steve Hillage band

Now I'm tempted to poll the Pitchfork-industrial complex vs. the Fantano-industrial complex.

― pomenitul, Friday, July 24, 2020 6:52 PM (thirty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i insist that you do not turn ilx into rym

There are polls on RYM?

They rate. We poll. Always remember that.

literally every rym shoutbox is a TS: pitchfork-industrial complex vs. the fantano-industrial complex

i enjoy ilxor.com bc most of the people here do not give a shit about this

stung by my words, the PIC have only gone and given Dey a review lol

"lowly underlings u may have a 7.5 so as not to upset the Great Chain of Being. now let us gird ourselves for the taytay 9.0"

I was thinking the Steve Hillage band

― Muswell Hillbilly Elegy (President Keyes)

president keyes knows my prog heart

i've never actually heard of king khan before, and now i'm learning about this:

Black Power Tarot
In 2014 King Khan had the vision to celebrate Black Power using the mystic language of Tarot. He chose 26 African American people whom he felt followed a true path of illumination despite being born in a country that was so corrupt with racism and vehemently against them. Khan had studied the Tarot over a decade and was given a deck of the Tarot de Marseilles by Alejandro Jodorowsky while he visited him at his home. Jodorowsky's personal teachings paved the way for Khan to understand the Tarot much deeper than ever before. The mission behind the "Black Power Tarot" was to add a heavy dose of surrealistic mythos to American history by replacing the archetypes of the major arcana with the chosen people thus giving the world a new deck. Khan shared this vision with Belfast artist, Michael Eaton who then came up with the drawings. Khan provided him with many specific design instructions to stay true to the sacred geometry of the Marseilles deck, so that this deck could be used in the same way. Khan then presented the drawings to Jodorowsky, who was asked to approve of each one. Jodorowsky approved 17 of the 22 cards in the first round. Khan & Eaton made the proper changes to the 5 remaining cards until they finally received Jodo's blessings and the supreme honour of being two of his spiritual warriors.

which has the better IPA recommendations?

― Muswell Hillbilly Elegy (President Keyes)

answer hazy, ask again later

the rym katie dey score is a 75

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/katie-dey-mydata/

Where is your god now, lj?

as alluded to above!

Saddened to hear what RYM has become, I was mostly there in the late 00s and I'd gotten such a big wishlist that it didn't make sense to keep looking for new music recommendations regularly anymore when I hadn't fulfilled the basics of each genre.

Shoutbox seems like a bad idea.

I don't recognize much of a difference there since the late 00s. Pretty sure Whiney was saying the same stuff about them back in 2010.

Complaining about RYM is like complaining about Reddit. Wherever a gaggle of nerds gather, dumbass invasive opinions are bound to sprout.

I was on it all the time back then and I hardly ever seen aggressive behavior (it was usually metalheads complaining about "hipsters" or elitist posturing if anything). I rarely went to the forums though.

At least 30-35% of the best music I discover in a given year is through RYM and I don't give a shit about Shoutbox, et al.

I don't recognize much of a difference there since the late 00s. Pretty sure Whiney was saying the same stuff about them back in 2010.

― Muswell Hillbilly Elegy (President Keyes)

from my perspective, i was a very different person in 2010 than i am now.

from my perspective, rym _has_ changed. for the better, in a lot of ways. i like a lot of things about it. i use it a lot.

it's not a shining city on a hill. it's not "better" than pitchfork. it does some things pitchfork doesn't. pitchfork does some things it doesn't. pitchfork, too, has gotten a lot better since 2010, although that's hard to judge, hard to measure, because so many things around us have gotten so much worse.

imago is a fantastic person and his opinions are a stew of confounding variables

i read the word "endogeneity" for the first time today and i looked it up on wikipedia and the article explaining it did it in terms of other jargon terms that i also don't understand but that word might have more bearing than "confounding variables".

I spend a lot more time on RYM than here, since I don't have much in the way of insight or expertise into anything I sometimes feel out of my depth on ilx, whereas on RYM I can just potter around lists etc safe in the knowledge that there's far, far worse than me out there though some of my earlier reviews could be bad-tempered. Sure it's full of dickheads but name me somewhere online that isn't. Meme kiddies and weird cranks are easily laughed off and there's a blocklist you can use for especially toxic people.

But it's the best place I've found to really disappear down various rabbit holes either

...to things that are new to you or to stuff you already love (it helps in my case that large portions of the community that are into artsy metal and/or weird Japanese shit)

Anyway, not sure of what I'm trying to convince anyone of.

I sometimes feel out of my depth on ilx

We're all a bunch of dilettantes here, some are just better at camouflage than others.

Find the site quite cool myself. Certainly a great way to find people with the same taste as you and check what kind of music they are digging.

yeah it's cool when you make friends on there and everything they review pops up in your feed. have discovered a ton of stuff this way.

I've started using RYM a bit more the last couple of years. It's dumb to think there's equivalency between the likes discussed here, ILM, RYM, PIC are all different beasts. ILM is by far the best for diving deep into a new, talked about release. But like Pom said, the releases that get this treatment here are more and more of a singular kind or genre. (blabla ilm used to be so much better) One thing I do like about RYM is that it shaves off the hype-layer of new releases. It's the 'wisdom' of the crowd, yes. But it's more helpful than PIC putting a 10 on Fiona Apple while doing a mediocre at best attempt at explaining why except for a zeitgeisty reason. On ILM - and Kate rightfully heralded our great critics - the tendency to declare a new release AOTY five minutes after its release isn't particularly helpful either. New 1975? Aoty. New Jessie Ware? Aoty. New Fiona Apple? Aoty. New taytay? Also Aoty. It's part (ilm)meme, I get that, but it increases hype inflation.
That awful 'wisdom of the crowd' at RYM at least chaves off the 0,5's and the 5's. Since I mostly look at niche genres there (from vaporwave to subcategories of ambient and japanese music, for one) you can actually get a sense of direction and discover some good stuff. The shoutbox-stuff is easy to ignore, too.

Tl;dr: RYM is good not bad for niche genres w/ dedicated users doing the rating; nearly all outlets struggle w/ pop music. Same as it ever was tbh.

New 1975? Aoty. New Jessie Ware? Aoty. New Fiona Apple? Aoty. New taytay? Also Aoty.

*takes notes*

ok, i'll say what i like about rym, why i get more music recommendations from rym than i get from anywhere else

first off is scale. there is not, really, "wisdom" of the crowd here. there is not a voice. there is not a vox populi. every record released is a battle. some are skirmishes. some are wars. these are not, generally, wars in which i fight.

the people running the site set the rules of combat, and they do it without a heavy hand, and they do it, generally speaking, well. the shoutboxes are awful and were, as far as i can tell, created as a release valve for the site's worst shitposting aspects, to draw the shitposters away from writing reviews and allow them to actually moderate the reviews meaningfully. i hope the shoutboxes will go and that they will go soon.

what rym does well, very well, is from an ease of use and design perspective. they have a volunteer community, and the data on releases is not as thorough or as well-maintained as discogs, which has a reputation for being utterly and completely comprehensive - it scares me, honestly, whenever i go on discogs and look for a release and find it's _not there_. that's when i know i am very deep in a rabbit hole.

discogs is great when i want to know who plays on an album, who wrote songs, details like that that often aren't thoroughly there on rym. i can't find anything there. there are no reviews, the ratings are all five stars because they're made by people who are trying to sell the records, because discogs is more than anything else a marketplace.

maybe it is familiarity but i find it much easier to use rym for discovery. i am very fond of the front page reviews, which are not necessarily updated on a regular basis (i'd prefer if they would be, i'd prefer if featured reviews were archived more accessibly), but are well curated, which typicall give me a good idea first of new and hot releases but also of some overlooked older releases.

i am looking at the top ranked 2020 charts again, for the first time in two months, and i have 20 new tabs open of albums to check out. everything is sortable by genre, if i want to avoid "popular" or widely acclaimed records i can do that. if i want to see what the most acclaimed albums from the ukraine albums are, or the most acclaimed goa releases are, i can do that. the information i will get is absolutely _biased_ by the userbase. if i ask a ukrainian what their favourite ukrainian records are, their answers are very unlikely to match up very well with rym's recommendations.

but fuck it, a lot of the records rym rates _are_ good, very fucking good, and they're records that few people will talk about. people here will talk about them, and this is a message board, right? it's not a resource, it's a community, it's a place where people who have similar interests hang out and talk about things. there are some people on rym i like a lot, some people whose reviews i respect a lot, and there is a lot of noise, and rym is useful because it gives me the tools to filter its data set to give me more or less what i am looking for.

I think these analogies with “wars” is reading too much into it - in the end RYM just reflects what music enthusiasts like. And people-super-into-music have never really taken teen/celebrity culture seriously, and had fun putting it down. A generation ago few people took New Kids On The Block, Tiffany, Modern Talking, Wham or 2 Unlimited very seriously, so why whould kids today do the same with the Biebers, Cardis, Swifts or Malones? Music nerds have always gravitated towards (pseudo-)intellectual prog and “authenticity”.

(people didn’t take...etc)

I think these analogies with “wars” is reading too much into it

― Siegbran

well, maybe it's overblown, mainly what i want to get is that there is no "reconciliation" or "consensus" reflected in the rankings - the constant fight between the 5.0s and 0.5s is merely a more extreme version of how records actually get rated on rym. people are incredibly invested in making sure that as many other people as possible like their favorite records and, equally, that as many other people as possible _dislike_ the records they dislike. here, we have a dedicated thread for that and i spend a great deal of my time here gently chiding its chief instigator.

So here's a problem I have, OK? Here's a problem. I looked at RYM's chart of 2020 albums, and I opened a couple dozen tabs, and I went to check some of them out. I can do that from within the browser, they have an embed to Bandcamp from within the browser on a lot of them, and I think that's really cool. It's incredibly easy and convenient and I think Bandcamp is a great site. And I put on a demo record of Machine Girl's and it's some extremely interesting and creative stuff and maybe some of it gets a little darker than I want to deal with right now so I moved on.

And I moved on to this singer-songwriter named A.A. Williams who released her first album earlier this month, and I click on the Bandcamp link, and the first song is titled "All I Asked for (Was to End It All)", and that's what it's about, as Talking Heads would say.

It's a beautiful song, wonderfully performed, extremely honest and direct, and the things that Williams says in that song are things I've said to myself over and over and over again, things I've heard from people I care about over and over and over again, and in 2020, I hear them more and more often. And I am alive, still, and I am working really hard to stay that way, and some of the people I care about are not.

What am I going to say? Fuck art, reducing suffering is all that matters? The hell with that. The hell with that.

And on RYM, well, I'm not going to say anything at all, because it has very well-intentioned standards about what is appropriate and what is not appropriate to say about an album, and what I want to say whenever I hear an album like this, which in 2020 is more and more often, is "For the love of God, don't kill yourself, you are valuable, you are loved, you are worthy, _we need you_." And that is not a review that's written to a standard whereby it is publishable on RYM.

I don't blame Williams for saying what she has to say. I don't think it's in any way wrong of inappropriate for her to speak her truth in the best way she knows how. I celebrate her, celebrate her work, celebrate her _life_.

And I guess RYM celebrates her too, in their own way, by ranking her album, as of the latest charts update, the 162nd best album of 2020, with an average rating of 3.49 out of 5.0 from 191 ratings. Its primary genres are "Post-Rock" and "Singer-Songwriter". Its descriptors are "melancholic, longing, atmospheric, female vocals, male vocals".

Melancholic! Galen would be so fucking proud.

I haven't browsed RYM much, but I think I'll make an account there just as sort of a listening log kind of thing. But this is confusing now as they're planning to change to "Sonemic" which is in beta. Has anyone used that? Am I better off just signing up there instead?

https://rateyourmusic.com/wiki/RYM:Sonemic+FAQ
https://sonemic.com/

damn, when i thought the website couldn't get uglier

i guess it does or will include last.fm-style scrobbling, which is not what I've got in mind as far as logging what I'm listening to (too many different sources...and levels of inattention on my part). Anyway if no one has tried Sonemic I'll give it a go later today and report back.

Well nevermind: "You cannot create an account during this beta. If you have an account on rateyourmusic.com, you can use that to login. Otherwise, please make an account on rateyourmusic.com now and you'll be able to use Sonemic/Cinemos/Glitchwave when the next beta launches."

Earlier, i didn't even notice the search bar on the top at sonemic.com. Looking at a band page, it's seems the same as RYM... for all I know!

I rate these website titles *

the planned rebrand to sonemic is truly baffling. there's also betas for film & games versions of it that have equally terrible names

sonemic -> cinemos is some wonderful aspie shit, i dig

hope the games one is called like... me, sonic

of the aspects of rym that are very web 2.0, the major relaunch/rebrand that nobody wants, that will probably drive away large swaths of the site's existing users when it happens, and that we all go around pretending to ourselves/hoping will never actually happen... is certainly one of them

the games one is glitchwave

now that is a truly abysmal name, what on earth is the rationale there lol

'we have developed a games rating database and community, and we have named it after a niche, possibly fictional musical genre'

This must be the longest rebranding operation in history, the Sonemic name (and Indiegogo funding for the rebrand) was announced in 2015, I expect the whole thing will be slowly buried.

Neptunian Maximalism album rules btw--makes a great third w the first Obake album & Zu's Cortar Todo

A complaint: why do we have to check a box when we want our reviews made public? That makes it seem like private reviews are the default for most people.

I thought this weird design choice wouldn't last but it has.

Discovered "customize this page" on the bottom... hides all reviews forever. This site rules now.

A major problem with the development of Sonemic is that they're taking the suggestions from the nerdiest of users. If anything buries the site, that will be it. But yeah I'm not really sorry that it's taking them forever to migrate the site. Which I can't explain even imagining all the trouble in rewriting all the code.
They hired a communication person, which is a really good idea.
The site is awesome to be honest, the problem is the demographics. Too young, bad nerdy taste.

bad nerdy taste

Care to expand on that?

I dunno, the maintainers seem to me to be building the site that they want, and would probably need to hire more than a comms person if It's ever going to have wider appeal.

It's quirky to use (Kate otm "web 2.0") but seems to be the best thing around for actively keeping track of your listening. It doesn't touch Discogs for keeping track of a collection, but ratings there seem like an afterthought.

Care to expand on that?
― pomenitul, Friday, July 31, 2020 7:21 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I mean looking for qualities in music that cannot be played in any social setting, a bedroom cult(ure) of the niche, obscure, subculture, difficult, hardcore, maximalist, minimalist, original, novelty. It's a little tiring and unhealthy and not ideal to engage music together. I'm sure others would paint a picture where RYM is painfully safe and middle of the road, which is not necessarily irreconcilable. I'm pretty sure it's a question of age and perspective, I speak as someone in his 30s who is feeling more like consolidating his taste and finding instant jams than lending his ear to everything. But RYM was very satisfying for me from 2007-2012, and I've stayed, maybe it's tough love.

Sounds like good nerdy taste to me (I'm in my mid-thirties and have been like this my whole life, mind you).

I can't really explain why it codes as bad nerdy taste, but what I see as the primary RYM community definitely gives off bad nerdy vibes. Something very solipsistic about it, maybe? Just the worst possible take on Nabozo's description. I feel like, basically, the outspoken folks on there are engaging with music for a completely different reason than me and I just don't understand it, too much gatekeeping and canon-building and inventing subgenres and trying way too hard to pretend zolo is a real thing*. And fucking Bull of Heaven.

*don't @ me frogbs ;)

“bedroom cult(ure) of the niche, obscure, subculture, difficult, hardcore, maximalist, minimalist, original, novelty”

none of these things are bad necessarily but the dominant rym userbase tends to define & identify signifiers of them in the most tediously limited & clearly demographically-conditioned ways. a bit like the wire or early pitchfork but a lot redditier

^^^yes, this.

Can you say what's wrong with canon-building? Is it being too hasty or something like that?

Too centralized and authoritarian, I assume? We all have our head-canons, though.

How online users build anything other than personal canons?

Well, RYM does aggregate personal canons into charts that may or may not seek to appear authoritative.

Right. They should just be less Redditious about it.

Could just be me but when I spend too much time on RYM I'm left with the sense that their community prioritizes/emphasizes canon-building as part of the process of listening whereas I feel like it's something that should just sort of happen, it's fun to make lists every once in a while but it feels weird to make that an end.

I think the problem is general impatience to put out their opinions, same with the ratings and reviews (and all of you ilxor people who think it's reasonable to have a best of year list before the year is even finished! Febuary is the best time to reflect on the previous year). Forming a canon requires some time and reflection.

Too centralized and authoritarian, I assume? We all have our head-canons, though.

― pomenitul

needs more intersectionality i would say

as little as i trust "canons" in general, i particularly don't trust any "canon" derived primarily from fantano and /mu/. interrogating the systems that generate hegemony in any form is a pivotal necessity.

“bedroom cult(ure) of the niche, obscure, subculture, difficult, hardcore, maximalist, minimalist, original, novelty”

none of these things are bad necessarily but the dominant rym userbase tends to define & identify signifiers of them in the most tediously limited & clearly demographically-conditioned ways.
― the state is bad (Left), Saturday, August 1, 2020 5:53 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I agree. It's also a lack of diversity both in music and music appreciation, for a community that perceives itself as open-minded and free of prejudice.

I question the critical abilities of a community that rates Tool as highly as RYM does, but I'm also very aware that maybe the problem is with me.

ok look I have no idea if "Zolo" is a real thing or not I just know that almost everything I've heard that's been tagged that way I've liked, in fact that one popular Zolo list on RYM really did lead me to a lot of cool stuff

I guess my take is that Zolo is more a supertype, like a color. same way you can have a "green car" but not just a "green", I dont know if there's such a thing as just "Zolo". maybe Albert Marcœur which is a little too wawaweewa even for me

my current take is that "zolo" is a retroactively constructed and arbitrary genre - but that's not, honestly, the crux of my discomfort. none of the '80s artists who are currently classified as "zolo" would have identified themselves as such at the time. that makes me uncomfortable to a certain extent, there's an element of appropriation to retroactively canonize, say, kate bush as a "zolo goddess" or whatever, _particularly_ given the demographics of the people who are doing so. it's... the framing, the genres rym praise and uplift and in some cases basically _create_ - the same sort of thing that's been happening with RA of late.

I really like that that retroactive construction of genres and I feel like there's a little bit of that going on even in fully fledged ones. As long as you know the musicians never intended this.

okay, i just looked at the "zolo" description thing on rym and wow, that shit is pretty overbearing and pompous. feels like some dude decided to make up a genre for their favorite records and simultaneously didn't want to just say, "ya, i like new wave-era rock music."

feels like some dude decided to make up a genre for their favorite records and simultaneously didn't want to just say, "ya, i like new wave-era rock music."

― Totally different head. Totally. (Austin)

this is literally where zolo came from

how quaint.

Was zolo coined by specific user such as imago?

this is as good a time and place as any to announce my one-man record solo zolo. please do not categorize me

idk it's definitely a specific subset of 'new wave-era rock music' and I think it extends to some prog records as well...actually when I think of Zolo I think first of Gentle Giant

again as "overbearing and pompous" as it is I think this is one of the strengths of RYM. even if "some dude decided to make up a genre for their favorite records" this dude has similar taste to me so this sort of thing is very useful

rym is full of weirdos like that, heirs to the "weird 78 collector" tradition that Camaraderie is so well-acquainted with. any time i get digging into weird old records, because i am a weird old lady who is uncommonly obsessed with the music of the 1970s, i find that whatever the record, it is already on A List compiled by this kind of disturbing guy who goes by Zaragon (and who I sometimes get mixed up with Nabozo, sorry, Nabozo, you don't deserve that).

seriously, look at this guy's page and tell me it isn't some batshit crazy timecube shit:

https://rateyourmusic.com/~Zaragon

"maximal trilustrum"? that's not a thing, sir. i'd tell him to his face, except that i have a strong sense that it is important for my self-preservation to put as much distance as possible between me and him.

and also because, shrug, i guess he has heard a whole shitload of cool records i haven't yet.

my new favorite genre is called ozlo. it's french pop music sung by people whose native language is not french. all we got so far is april march, dick annegarn, and louis phillipe. but yeah: ozlo's fucking rad!!

this is all making rym seem more endearing than I assumed it was just a few minutes ago tbh

there's a guy who exclusively reviews one-off 70s singles from the Midwest, I love that guy

xps. louis phillipe is French!

No true ILMer can seriously root against music obsessives who flaunt their insufferably niche tastes.

sounds like a challenge to me.

No true ILMer can seriously root against music obsessives who flaunt their insufferably niche tastes.

idk posters railing at length against personality traits they themselves exhibit is all the rage on ILX so it's a tough call

True. Literally takes one to know one.

this is all making rym seem more endearing than I assumed it was just a few minutes ago tbh

― the quar on drugs (Simon H.)

it is incredibly endearing! seriously i've found so much rad music through that site. much as i'll bitch about the site, it's not like i actually hate "egyptian shumba" or anything.

my current take is that "zolo" is a retroactively constructed and arbitrary genre - but that's not, honestly, the crux of my discomfort. none of the '80s artists who are currently classified as "zolo" would have identified themselves as such at the time. that makes me uncomfortable to a certain extent, there's an element of appropriation to retroactively canonize, say, kate bush as a "zolo goddess" or whatever, _particularly_ given the demographics of the people who are doing so. it's... the framing, the genres rym praise and uplift and in some cases basically _create_ - the same sort of thing that's been happening with RA of late.

― Kate (rushomancy), Wednesday, August 5, 2020 12:11 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is my take, too, only far better articulated than it would have been coming from me. I like a lot of the stuff that gets lumped into this category, but the reason for my opposition to it existing as a "genre" is pretty well summed up by Kate's post. I love to go through the lists on there where people obviously put a lot of thought into it (not the "I will out-obscure you now!" ones), and if "zolo" was just one of those lists, then I'd probably be able to live with it. Probably shouldn't have brought it up in the first place ha.

score another one for 'zolo is a nonsense, yours, a fan of lots of 'zolo''

imo It's extremely dumb for them to go through every single release and tag "female vocals" or "male vocals."

However I definitely agree with those upthread who found it extremely helpful that they now embed every Bandcamp release on its own page.

imo It's extremely dumb for them to go through every single release and tag "female vocals" or "male vocals."

― billstevejim

well at least it seems to be done right - records featuring trans women on vocals are tagged as "female vocals". so i approve!

I'm in the mood for some "male vocals" tonight

There's also an 'androgynous vocals' tag. The overall guiding principle is anal, sure, but it seems pretty inclusive to me.

So this Sonemic thing? (Sonic + anemic?) Are they mining the RYM site to make list articles and Spotify playlists?

https://rateyourmusic.com/feature/sonemic-selects-black-sounds/

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2XLwpm5AHRIgSUotLss175

2020 | Sonemic Selects

A curated selection of tracks from the top-charting singles, EPs, and albums of 2020 on Rate Your Music / Sonemic.

A few weeks ago I reported a French black metal album for fash lyrics (the speaker describes himself as an 'eternally wandering Aryan' who worries that Spain will be overrun by 'Berber scum'). Still no acknowledgement to this day.

I don't think it ought to be removed from RYM's catalogue outright, but adding the usual disclaimer does, I think, make a difference:

This page has been marked by our userbase as describing content that contains Nazi/National Socialist material.

RYM does not host, sell, or distribute this material, and we do not agree with the opinions expressed by those who created/recorded it.

We have included these works in the RYM database for reference. It's our goal to document the existence of all film and music recordings, whether or not we agree with the content. We do not believe that an effective strategy in fighting these ideologies is to pretend that these recordings don't exist; in fact, it hinders those who want to speak against it by denying them a forum to educate others about the hateful content contained within the recordings.

If you are involved in recording a project marked by our users as Nazi/NSBM material and wish to refute this claim, then please submit a feedback (bottom of the page) with your contact information or an explanation and we will get in touch with you.

Major site update with tons of new features. The charts are wild and there are new subscription modes.

looks way better than that horrible beta site update i looked at a few months ago, musonic or whatever

Agreed, it's much nicer. Lots of cool touches like easily setting listening, genre tag clouds, a much better organised split between the main chart and esoteric.

one thing I'm not seeing is upcoming releases - my 'new releases' page only has stuff that's been released in the last month or so, nothing coming up in the future. that was my primary way of finding out when artists I liked were releasing new music. did it just move somewhere?

yeah they've improved a lot from last time i looked at the beta, i'm impressed

it seems like the upcoming releases section is gone but there's a lot of people complaining about it in the feedback thread so maybe they'll add it back?

it was really nice b/c basically every artist I'm interested in I've rated on that site, whereas the "upcoming" on Discogs is pretty much all reissues and comps, mostly by bands that are only in my collection because I bought one of their records for a dollar

otherwise new design is pretty nice

oh cool, it's back. guess they listened

It still looks pretty awful on mobile.

oh cool, it's back. guess they listened

Where? In the 'my new releases' section I'm still only seeing like two upcoming releases.

Oh, ignore me. It's in it's usual place. Would be nice if they integrate the two though.

*its...

Not only is RYM woefully lacking in the classical department (loads of missing releases + extra gatekeeping before you can add them yourself – basically a full time job), it’s in the throes of a tiny cabal of pseudo enthusiasts who rate everything between 0.5 and 1.5 and I can’t imagine a more joyless, detestable bunch (their overall taste is usually shit, to boot, as their precious few 4.5s tend to demonstrate).

I was listening to Younghi Pagh-Paan’s Silken Thread (Wergo, 2020) last night and thinking about what a stupidly underrated composer she is and how much I enjoy this particular album, only to check, out of idle curiosity, whether it had been added to the database. Sure enough, the usual suspects slapped a 1 and a 0.5 on it, respectively, and I just can’t imagine keeping up one’s edgelord act for this long.

It’s also trivially easy to correct for, RYM can just silently drop all ratings from people who rate 3000+ albums.

Yeah the different cabals out to ruin most genres are obnoxious, see basically any mainstream pop record too. Not sure I agree with Siegbran's fix though, I mean I myself have more than 3,000 records in my collection and all rated. I'd hate to lose those.

I mean, don't get me wrong. That site is filled with awful people and I'm very happy that I've never even set foot into the forums over there. But I long ago started tracking my collection there and I find it useful for that.

the site does deweight negative ratings from people who give a lot of negative ratings

those classical edgelords need to be uh yeeted into the sun (i believe that's the au courant terminology) tho

Modern Icaruses, truly.

whereas i tend to give positive ratings, so if i rate something low, it fucking means something

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?