Type of site Database and community Created by Hossein Sharifi Alexa rank 7094 (June 2015) | Owner Hossein Sharifi Website rateyourmusic.com | |
Available in English, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish | ||
Rate Your Music (or RYM) is an online collaborative metadata database of musical and non-musical releases and films which can be catalogued, rated and reviewed by users.
Contents
History and features
Rate Your Music was founded on December 24, 2000 by Seattle resident Hossein Sharifi. Unlike Discogs, focusing on electronic music, Rate Your Music was in its beginning more rock oriented, before gradually integrating every other genre. The main idea of the website is to allow the users to add albums, EPs, singles, videos and bootlegs to the database and to rate them. The rating system uses a scale of minimum a half-star (or 0.5 points) to maximum five stars (or 5 points). In this manner, Rate Your Music bears resemblance to a wiki, as all of the databases content is generated jointly by the registered user community (artists, releases, biographies,…); however, the majority of new, edited content must be approved by a moderator to prevent virtual vandalism.
RYM 1.0, the first version of the website, allowed the users to rate and catalog releases, as well as to write reviews, create lists and add artists and releases to the database. Over time, other features were progressively added, like cover art, a community board (forums) or private messaging. On August 7, 2006, RYM 2.0, a completely new version of the website was launched, introducing new features like the possibility to add track lists, labels, catalog numbers, concerts or venues.
As a result of rising expenses, the website ceased relying solely on donations in 2006 and began receiving revenue from other sources. Namely, the two changes were commission-based links to online music retailers, and Google AdSense links (which registered users can elect not to view). The user response to these changes was overwhelmingly positive, because of the democratic nature of the decision, which was openly proposed and discussed on the website before implementation, and the relatively unobtrusive nature of the links.
In May 2009, Rate Your Music started to add films to its database.
Custom Charts and Recommendations
A particular feature on Rate Your Music are the Custom Charts. They are weekly updated rankings of the releases and films in the database according to their popularity among the users. Every user can themselves define the criteria after which the charts are compiled: the highest or the lowest rated releases and films can for example be ranked by year, decade, format or country. Weighted averages are used to calculate the ordering for these charts; regular members who write reviews and rate more albums have a greater weight applied to their ratings.
A user can recommend films, artists and releases to a friend or any other user on RYM. There is also an automatic personalized recommendation feature, which generates suggestions of new music to the user based on the ratings he or she has already given.
Statistics
In December 2011, there were approximately 370 000 user accounts on Rate Your Music. Around one half of the people visiting the website come from the United States, the United Kingdom or Canada, the other half primarily comes from Western Europe (especially Scandinavia and the Netherlands), as well as from Poland, Russia, Mexico, Brazil and Australia.
Music projects
As of 2004, Rate Your Music allows a very reduced number of unsigned artists to host their MP3 files of recordings on the main server. Since 2009, members of the site's community have released several tribute/cover albums as free downloads.