www.rateyourmusic.com C/D?

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)