Journal

[19:15] Uninterpretative: it honestly does look like discogs for retarded people

It wasn't too long ago that I started seeing lots of folks on last.fm linking to pages on a site called "Rate Your Music," primarily for things like favorite album lists, but also in their profiles for no specific reason. Now, of course, for the longest time, I never followed or payed mind to these links at all. But as I started seeing more and more of them, I became embarrassingly intrigued as to why users on a music-oriented social networking site (of sorts) would be feverishly linking to another music-oriented social networking site. So, one day I pointed my Firefox to www.rateyourmusic.com and set up an account to see what it was all about.

After using many of the site's features, I can say with total conviction that I'm not at all sure what it is all about.

Rate Your Music ("RYM") appears to be a poorly conceived, unpleasant chimera of MySpace, last.fm and Discogs. It encourages the same sort of music discussion as last.fm, but with giant, ultra-generalized cluttered forums and no "shoutboxes" on artist pages, any real conversations are likely carried out through bullets back and forth from one user's page to another's. Otherwise, the conversation seems to consist primarily of someone writing a lousy, poorly worded 2/3 paragraph "review" of a record, and someone responding with another "review" a couple of months later to call them a fuckkin faggot dipshit dumbass.

Adding a new release to the database can be quite a chore. Indeed, to add a split release (like I wanted to do with the Merzbow / MSBR 7" "Destructible Foundation / Drain") you can't have the release link to each of the artists separately: I had to add a new artist entry for "Merzbow / MSBR." What the hell. I'm not sure how one goes about submitting a compilation featuring various artists; I never dared to do it myself. And yet despite many inane restrictions and hoops you need to jump through to enter releases, specifying things like label, catalog number, media, tracklistings and other integral information is not required.

what

Users are also permitted to submit releases that they don't own, and in some cases, releases that they have in all likelihood never seen in their entire lives.

Visually the site is an eyesore, and can be very difficult to navigate. Organizing your collection is much more trouble than it's worth, and isn't as easy to refer to or to export as it is on Discogs. When marking releases that you own, you are told to specify the format that you own it in. Which is uhhhh COMPLETELY assbackwards since if a release has more than one format, it should probably have multiple entries. (This option seems to exist primarily for the purpose of openly encouraging users to mark albums which they own illegally or digitally in their "collections.") Though the site is quick to link you to places where you can (might be able to) buy the albums it has entries for, their is no way to list items of your own.

I could go on and on, and indeed originally I intended to! But the long and short of it is that Rate Your Music tries to do too many things at once, while at the same time leaving out key features that are necessary to make what it's trying to accomplish relevant. And even the things it does do, it does poorly or in a very roundabout manner that's covered by and exceeded in quality by other sites. Please stop giving them advertising revenue.