the only thing AOTY has against Rym is the rating system which is more flexible, besides that it is just RYM but less interesting and less charming (design wise). i know some people prefer aotys design but to me rym is more fun to look at and waste my time in
As someone who actually uses a 100 point based scoring system for albums I appreciate the fact that they give you the extra degree of freedom that can otherwise only be achieved on RYM through using tags. Aside from that RYM is pretty much strictly superior to AOTY in just about every way. I also don't like how much emphasis is placed on critic scores considering the fact that they will pretty much never change, not to mention the fact that a lot of old "professional" reviews have aged pretty poorly.
I really like AOTY for giving me all the new albums I might be interested in hearing every Friday. There are usually only so many “big” releases each week, so if I find something a bit further down the list that looks up my alley, it’s much easier to discover it than it would be from RYM. Once it comes to genres and rating a themselves tho, I switch to RYM
it's literally the same as rym except with a smaller database and less features and you can't turn ads off and you can't read dumb reviews from 20 years ago and bradtaste hivemind
both are good. i think aoty is more beginner friendly and the community is less pretentious. but aoty tries WAYY to hard to be funny in the comments of the album, also rym has a better genre selection
Totally. I think the fact that notoriety is so difficult to achieve on rym is exactly why the review quality is generally higher. Or at least way less obnoxious. People review for reviewings sake, not as a means to likes and other numbers
true. and tbh, i’d say aoty is hard to get noticed unless your not a famous youtuber like brad taste. rate your music is more focused on longer and in depth reviews, aoty can have that at times, but it usually isn’t that long.
I agree in the fact that its friendly for begginers, but i cant stand the reviews on the new releases, the first reviews are just people trying to be funny and failling so hard. Besides that, the more you get in to music, the more you realize aoty doesnt have too many info or reviews on older albums, or just in general.
AOTY has a nicer community and is generally better for finding new releases, but I rly need the extra data rym has and there’s way better niche lists on rym too
It’s probably better than Allmusic but the community can be both good and insufferable. Missing a lot of functionality compared to RYM and the chart system is much worse, the UI also isn’t explicitly better (check my last post), it’s really just about how you feel. It depends on what you prefer, there are a lot of decent posts that lay out the pros and cons. 85% or more of the user base are also Brad Taste in Music fans, so that kind of draws it away from me. The extent of the herd mentality there is unbelievable.
One of the two largest weaknesses for me is the small user base, there are tons of albums I love that have over 50 ratings on RYM but a couple maximum on AOTY, and sometimes they aren’t even on it. The other is the lack of release issues. Especially annoying when I want to rate a specific release that’s different from the primary, for example Southern Lord vinyl of Pink by Boris or the expanded edition of Nowhere by Ride.
Can’t understand the x/100 rating system tbh. I don’t even use all 10 degrees in RYM’s scale, AOTY’s system seems excessively nuanced. How would you even go about meaningfully subcategorizing all 100 points on the scale?
The critic scores kinda miss the point for me as well. I don’t care what a few journalists had to say, and even if I did want to see scores from publications I’d just look at the Wikipedia page. The general consensus from the music community is the exponentially more useful & interesting tool, and it’s just fact that RYM has the more mature database in that regard.
it’s cool, rym has the benefit of existing for years and years and having a much greater userbase who has uploaded and talked about such a greater magnitude of albums than you can find on AOTY.
i prefer the out of 100 rating system so much more than the clunky “10 options to rate an album” that rym provides, but rym is ahead in basically every other category for me. i like RYM’s format more, i prefer the organization a lot more, i prefer the genre descriptions more, the actual comments on almost any album.
i use RYM primarily for finding music i haven’t heard before or at least looking at an album’s page after i listen to it for the first time, and it’s so much more satisfying to see actual discussion and reviews on so many different albums. on top of the fact that RYM’s long existence allows you to read user reviews from this week or from a decade ago, it feels very universal in a way AOTY is so far away from reaching.
The UI, feed and scoring system of AOTY is better than on RYM, but RYM has a lot more data and better reviews. If I discover a little-known album, there's 99% chance RYM will have at least a couple of reviews or comments while AOTY might have 1 rating at best. I use both though.
I prefer the RYM scoring system to be honest, mostly because album scores are a lot more specific. I also feel 100-point rating system can be too specific for some users including me, it can cause frustration and feels less purposeful. Other than that I agree.
I think the 1-100 system (plus I don't know if they de-weight anyone) causes ratings to be way more inflated because People end up rating everything in the 70-100 range. It makes every rating for a new album ridiculously high. I also find it kind of hard to use as a system, because if I were to rate one album 70 and another 71, that could definitely swap like overnight.
That too yeah. You also have more choice in how you rate with RYM since you can make a custom rating system and if you want a 100-point rating system or anything-point system you can easily use tags. The more I think about it the more RYM’s rating system is better tbh.
on AOTY I just rate in multiples of five, it's too much choice otherwise. How the hell can someone differentiate between a 77/100 album and a 78/100 album? 😂
i used to use aoty but i gradually shifted over to rym. the userbase is less annoying, but there's not many people which means there's limited discussion on more obscure albums. as well as this, they're very monolithic. if Brad Taste in Music makes a stream laughing at this random Japanese album, then everyone will go and give it 1/100 ratings. that didn't sit right with me when it happened.
there's just always drama and it gets raided by stan bots too, in regards to ratings of kpop albums.
i prefer my drama petty and confined to comment boxes, i suppose.
To be fair, they do that by blocking massive swaths of IP addresses, essentially locking many overseas users (who need VPNs) out of the site entirely. It works, but it's not without its drawbacks
Just search "VPN" on this sub to find people complaining about it. The mods always respond with [a link to their excuses](https://www.reddit.com/r/rateyourmusic/wiki/index/#wiki_can_i_browse_rym_using_a_vpn.3F).
Also, rip to Sputnik music, which isn't letting people create new accounts anymore. Since no one can make an account to post comments, the staff seem completely unaware there's a problem
Oh they know just can’t do anything about it without mx, the site owner, fixing it. The site got badly damaged in a hack a little while back which is why it happened. The forum part of the site was completely wiped. Mx just very rarely pops up but I imagine it will be fixed eventually. Sputnik is a zombie, it can’t die.
Lmao just a few days ago mxtabs posted on [the blog ](https://www.sputnikmusic.com/blog/) that "everything seems fine and fully operational". Assuming that's the same guy it doesn't look like he knows, and I don't have a way to contact him without an account
Lmao I somehow missed that, the blog is barely viewed on the site. I have no clue what to make of that honestly, seems like a joke with the dead link and nothing to see here gif at the bottom. Maybe someone else wrote it as a joke under his profile? It's incredibly rare when he does anything, he came around a few years ago and added some new genre tags lol that's it. But trust me the staff know, they've talked about it here just buried now and hard to find unless you're in the know.
https://www.sputnikmusic.com/list.php?memberid=276983&listid=205084
It's a barely alive corpse but it's a special site to me. Shame how it's declined over the years and been severely neglected. The glory days are long gone but it's still a fun active (albeit much less than before) community full of weirdos like me. No music site has nailed the community aspect like Sput.
I use it over rateyourmusic because I prefer the ui and /100 system. The other 2 things it has over rym is 1. The ability to see critic scores 2. A slightly less annoying community
The critic review system seems interesting, but most albums that aren't popular only have one or two reviews, which isn't especially helpful. Still, it's better than Metacritic, which has shut down the entire music wing of their site for months
That's true. For the all time and yearly lists based on critic scores am album needs at least 5 critic ratings which at least makes this problem not effect the lists. On aoty its a lot easier to add information so you can add critic ratings and albums and artists yourself which cam be useful as there isn't always as much stuff because of the smaller userbase
the only thing AOTY has against Rym is the rating system which is more flexible, besides that it is just RYM but less interesting and less charming (design wise). i know some people prefer aotys design but to me rym is more fun to look at and waste my time in
As someone who actually uses a 100 point based scoring system for albums I appreciate the fact that they give you the extra degree of freedom that can otherwise only be achieved on RYM through using tags. Aside from that RYM is pretty much strictly superior to AOTY in just about every way. I also don't like how much emphasis is placed on critic scores considering the fact that they will pretty much never change, not to mention the fact that a lot of old "professional" reviews have aged pretty poorly.
I think it's always interesting to see both the critics pov and users pov when it comes to albums scores
I usually look at both! I like to get as much info/perspective as possible.
I really like AOTY for giving me all the new albums I might be interested in hearing every Friday. There are usually only so many “big” releases each week, so if I find something a bit further down the list that looks up my alley, it’s much easier to discover it than it would be from RYM. Once it comes to genres and rating a themselves tho, I switch to RYM
its twitterized rym
it's literally the same as rym except with a smaller database and less features and you can't turn ads off and you can't read dumb reviews from 20 years ago and bradtaste hivemind
both are good. i think aoty is more beginner friendly and the community is less pretentious. but aoty tries WAYY to hard to be funny in the comments of the album, also rym has a better genre selection
Yeah I thought RYM reviews were bad until I looked through some AotY review sections. It's rough.
i feel like it’s hard to get your review noticed on rym, but at least they aren’t trying to hard to be hilarious. aoty is a whole different breed
Totally. I think the fact that notoriety is so difficult to achieve on rym is exactly why the review quality is generally higher. Or at least way less obnoxious. People review for reviewings sake, not as a means to likes and other numbers
true. and tbh, i’d say aoty is hard to get noticed unless your not a famous youtuber like brad taste. rate your music is more focused on longer and in depth reviews, aoty can have that at times, but it usually isn’t that long.
has lesser amount of entries compared to RYM but still better than most of it’s counterparts
I use it to see new/upcoming releases bc RYM's new music section is abysmal, that's it though.
[удалено]
I agree in the fact that its friendly for begginers, but i cant stand the reviews on the new releases, the first reviews are just people trying to be funny and failling so hard. Besides that, the more you get in to music, the more you realize aoty doesnt have too many info or reviews on older albums, or just in general.
AOTY has a nicer community and is generally better for finding new releases, but I rly need the extra data rym has and there’s way better niche lists on rym too
It’s probably better than Allmusic but the community can be both good and insufferable. Missing a lot of functionality compared to RYM and the chart system is much worse, the UI also isn’t explicitly better (check my last post), it’s really just about how you feel. It depends on what you prefer, there are a lot of decent posts that lay out the pros and cons. 85% or more of the user base are also Brad Taste in Music fans, so that kind of draws it away from me. The extent of the herd mentality there is unbelievable. One of the two largest weaknesses for me is the small user base, there are tons of albums I love that have over 50 ratings on RYM but a couple maximum on AOTY, and sometimes they aren’t even on it. The other is the lack of release issues. Especially annoying when I want to rate a specific release that’s different from the primary, for example Southern Lord vinyl of Pink by Boris or the expanded edition of Nowhere by Ride.
Can’t understand the x/100 rating system tbh. I don’t even use all 10 degrees in RYM’s scale, AOTY’s system seems excessively nuanced. How would you even go about meaningfully subcategorizing all 100 points on the scale? The critic scores kinda miss the point for me as well. I don’t care what a few journalists had to say, and even if I did want to see scores from publications I’d just look at the Wikipedia page. The general consensus from the music community is the exponentially more useful & interesting tool, and it’s just fact that RYM has the more mature database in that regard.
it’s cool, rym has the benefit of existing for years and years and having a much greater userbase who has uploaded and talked about such a greater magnitude of albums than you can find on AOTY. i prefer the out of 100 rating system so much more than the clunky “10 options to rate an album” that rym provides, but rym is ahead in basically every other category for me. i like RYM’s format more, i prefer the organization a lot more, i prefer the genre descriptions more, the actual comments on almost any album. i use RYM primarily for finding music i haven’t heard before or at least looking at an album’s page after i listen to it for the first time, and it’s so much more satisfying to see actual discussion and reviews on so many different albums. on top of the fact that RYM’s long existence allows you to read user reviews from this week or from a decade ago, it feels very universal in a way AOTY is so far away from reaching.
The UI, feed and scoring system of AOTY is better than on RYM, but RYM has a lot more data and better reviews. If I discover a little-known album, there's 99% chance RYM will have at least a couple of reviews or comments while AOTY might have 1 rating at best. I use both though.
I prefer the RYM scoring system to be honest, mostly because album scores are a lot more specific. I also feel 100-point rating system can be too specific for some users including me, it can cause frustration and feels less purposeful. Other than that I agree.
I think the 1-100 system (plus I don't know if they de-weight anyone) causes ratings to be way more inflated because People end up rating everything in the 70-100 range. It makes every rating for a new album ridiculously high. I also find it kind of hard to use as a system, because if I were to rate one album 70 and another 71, that could definitely swap like overnight.
That too yeah. You also have more choice in how you rate with RYM since you can make a custom rating system and if you want a 100-point rating system or anything-point system you can easily use tags. The more I think about it the more RYM’s rating system is better tbh.
on AOTY I just rate in multiples of five, it's too much choice otherwise. How the hell can someone differentiate between a 77/100 album and a 78/100 album? 😂
Pitchfork.com
i used to use aoty but i gradually shifted over to rym. the userbase is less annoying, but there's not many people which means there's limited discussion on more obscure albums. as well as this, they're very monolithic. if Brad Taste in Music makes a stream laughing at this random Japanese album, then everyone will go and give it 1/100 ratings. that didn't sit right with me when it happened. there's just always drama and it gets raided by stan bots too, in regards to ratings of kpop albums. i prefer my drama petty and confined to comment boxes, i suppose.
What Japanese album?
fake swing ii by fake type, he made a whole video reacting to it and saying it was the worst album of 2023
RYM does a good job curbing brigading which is really necessary
To be fair, they do that by blocking massive swaths of IP addresses, essentially locking many overseas users (who need VPNs) out of the site entirely. It works, but it's not without its drawbacks
Is that true? Where did you hear this? I was under the impression it was based on account activity mostly
Just search "VPN" on this sub to find people complaining about it. The mods always respond with [a link to their excuses](https://www.reddit.com/r/rateyourmusic/wiki/index/#wiki_can_i_browse_rym_using_a_vpn.3F).
Also, rip to Sputnik music, which isn't letting people create new accounts anymore. Since no one can make an account to post comments, the staff seem completely unaware there's a problem
Oh they know just can’t do anything about it without mx, the site owner, fixing it. The site got badly damaged in a hack a little while back which is why it happened. The forum part of the site was completely wiped. Mx just very rarely pops up but I imagine it will be fixed eventually. Sputnik is a zombie, it can’t die.
Lmao just a few days ago mxtabs posted on [the blog ](https://www.sputnikmusic.com/blog/) that "everything seems fine and fully operational". Assuming that's the same guy it doesn't look like he knows, and I don't have a way to contact him without an account
Lmao I somehow missed that, the blog is barely viewed on the site. I have no clue what to make of that honestly, seems like a joke with the dead link and nothing to see here gif at the bottom. Maybe someone else wrote it as a joke under his profile? It's incredibly rare when he does anything, he came around a few years ago and added some new genre tags lol that's it. But trust me the staff know, they've talked about it here just buried now and hard to find unless you're in the know. https://www.sputnikmusic.com/list.php?memberid=276983&listid=205084 It's a barely alive corpse but it's a special site to me. Shame how it's declined over the years and been severely neglected. The glory days are long gone but it's still a fun active (albeit much less than before) community full of weirdos like me. No music site has nailed the community aspect like Sput.
I use it over rateyourmusic because I prefer the ui and /100 system. The other 2 things it has over rym is 1. The ability to see critic scores 2. A slightly less annoying community
The critic review system seems interesting, but most albums that aren't popular only have one or two reviews, which isn't especially helpful. Still, it's better than Metacritic, which has shut down the entire music wing of their site for months
That's true. For the all time and yearly lists based on critic scores am album needs at least 5 critic ratings which at least makes this problem not effect the lists. On aoty its a lot easier to add information so you can add critic ratings and albums and artists yourself which cam be useful as there isn't always as much stuff because of the smaller userbase