Main Site

AOTY is better than RYM

Yo, name is Bradley. Even though I got featured on RYM for my YouTube channel, their website is such a pain to navigate and I just want to say that AOTY is underrated

I feel like the site is just super clean and pristine and the only issue I can think that is a common occurrence is the fake accounts that rate music.

9 Likes

RYM layout sucks, but the opinions are a lot more varied on there not to mention their database of albums is much more extensive, this website is much more focused on newer music and neglects a fair few genres, i mean there are certified classics with less than 10 ratings on here. On RYM there’s a decent amount of appreciation of everything. Sputnikmusic is nice compromise between the two with a better layout than both AOTY and RYM with a much bigger community than the former, they do overrate metal and emo a little though.

Having varied opinion, a wider database of albums, and a low number of ratings has to do with the amount of users the website has(as users can add albums themselves on AOTY, etc). Can’t blame AOTY for that, the site itself is beautiful and responsive.

Personally I’m stoked that AOTY is underrated, because you notice peoples opinions and tastes much clearer and you also actually notice when someone new joins and actually contributes like you ^^
Yeah, the fake accounts are the worst. But because its a small community its mostly noticed and trolled haha.

Also please point out these classics! If I’m missing out on some brilliant albums, I need to know :smiley:

Oh i don’t blame the website or anyone for it, it’s something you can’t help. But when looking for the general opinion of an artist or album you can’t really beat RYM, though because of the size it doesn’t really have a focused community like Sputnik or this site, it’s just a mass of people all throwing in their two cents with little back and forth discussion. Regarding classics send me a link to your profile and see if i can spot any you haven’t listened too.

1 Like

Had to take away my original post, published it accidentally while I was still writing it. There is a distinct set of pros and cons to both to me, which I will be listing out below:

RYM
Pros:
Ability to make lists;
Not-so-specific ratings;
You can explain your rating system.

Middle ground:
RYM has a very large community. Although it will be hard to make as much friends as you could have on AOTY, there is still a chance that you will find people that have a lot in common with your musical taste, or those that have really interesting recommendations.

Cons:
Very poor design;
Some useless features (the musical map comes off as one of them to me);
Can be tasking to find new music for you, no matter the release date.

AOTY
Pros:
Minimal and charming design;
Listeners can find new albums with ease;
Friendly community (except for the Shazes that appear every now and then);
Social feed.

Middle ground:
Some of the highest rated albums --AOTY’s cult classics, if you will-- aren’t even on the best of all time charts. Personally, I think that an album with at least 20 ratings should enter the charts. If anyone goes there --which I don’t know if most go there–, maybe they’ll find something that truly interests them.

Cons:
Some features are unnecessary (like the top albums of the year feature, that appears on most profiles right now);
The interface for writing reviews isn’t as complete as I wish it could be;
The specific rating system can be a burden, but it’s optional if you want to adhere to that rating system or not.

Overall, I find more advantages on AOTY than on RYM, but I still like to use both. I think that they complement one another, and I’d still say that it’s worth having an account on both due to that.

3 Likes

:open_mouth: I love that feature! hehe, great way to see what the person feels is the current front-runner for AOTY!

I understand you, but it’s not a feature that I would like having at the top of my profile, personally. I wish that would be optional or something.

3 Likes

No disagreements here with those pros and cons, though i gotta add the reviews on here, for the most part kinda suck, especially the track by track reviews by people giving them each a score out of 10 or 100 which give no incite to the album you’re looking at. Rateyourmusic has it’s fair share of weak reviews but you’ll often see one’s with several detailed paragraphs from users which are practically non-existent on here. Same thing with Sputnikmusic only there are even more extensive reviews written by the community and staff alike plus a little soundoff section where people just write a couple of sentences about the music that are more like the reviews on here. But as you said the community on here is great, only been on this site for a month and it’s easily noticeable.

2 Likes

Not a fan of the track-by-track reviews either. Though there’s a pattern for what kind of albums and listeners use it. I notice they tend to be on more commercial albums, which makes sense given that the people who write them are usually more interested in albums comprised of a group of singles

2 Likes

AOTY trumps RYM in almost every way except in one unfortunate aspect—the database itself. I feel like the way the database handles certain things leads to a lot of data redundancy. Split EP’s being a prime example. I should be able to see Darkbloom on both the Grimes and D’eon page but instead, it’s subjected to having its own page which leads to searching problems. There’s also the case of artist aliases; the artist Yumi Matsutoya has been credited as Yumi Arai and Yuming on several different releases. I could simply add these releases all under the Matsutoya entry but once again that can lead to more searching related issues. There’s a lot of small issues like this that make for an unpleasant experience when trying to discover music but hopefully, these issues will be ironed out but It’s a certainly not an easy undertaking to design something this big.

4 Likes

Yeah that’s true. Other good examples of that are artists like Prince, Bob Dylan, and Nick Cave. I don’t like that, for example, Prince & The Revolution is different from Prince alone.

2 Likes

Now that you’ve said it, I’d say that track ratings on RYM is something that definitely is a pro to that website, and I’d say AOTY could have it too. It would most definitely reduce those kinds of track-by-track reviews significantly --if not, swipe them off completely-- and I can see it easily adapting into AOTY’s rating system. Really hope that Rob considers adding formal track ratings one day.

1 Like

Working on a solution to this issue today. Could you give me a few more examples to test?

3 Likes

4 posts were split to a new topic: Additional Artists for an Album

I agree, but I’ll have to use both.

AOTY’s better by default cuz Rob doesn’t protect pedophiles and ban/insult victims for reporting them :eyes:

“listen just because his name is RealShotacon doesn’t mean anything, it’s just a username”
yeah, on your site full of 13 year olds, RYM

me and a couple friends reported him, were ignored so we did it again, got an insulting blowoff response and got banned for “harassing” mods

Did anything ever come of this split EP testing? It’s still not an option in the dropdown menu

Unfortunately, AOTY’s database is still very small. It lacks a lot of important, older releases, and even newer ones. It would be nice if it was integrated to Discogs…

2 Likes
https://forums.albumoftheyear.org/t/aoty-is-better-than-rym/897
forums.albumoftheyear.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2020-05
44258
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:NVBFDGU22OD2JNC7JMARTWXQH4PLQNOU
<urn:uuid:02bb241d-51a4-4f5e-8b19-4d92b794aca3>
2020-01-24T19:24:55Z
104.236.219.208
text/html
sha1:L643EWTRVTLWPBE4XKODTXYJWJ7NOGJ6
<urn:uuid:f2ae4acf-aeb0-47f1-ba74-fb4e4a5504c1>
https://forums.albumoftheyear.org/t/aoty-is-better-than-rym/897
response
<urn:uuid:db655cf0-9dd4-41e2-a380-0758ef7fecae>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-05
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for January 2020
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-129.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.16 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.1-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/