Have any of you visited this site? It allows you to rate and review albums; when a quorum of ratings is reached, it furnishes recommendations based on other users' input.

http://rateyourmusic.com

Yeah, I'm a member there and it's a pretty cool site. My only complaints are that the site's recommendations are usually a bit off compared to what you may like, and many of the users use the five-star rating way too loosely.

That's true, and there seems to be little or no supervision.

There used to be an email service called Ringo someone at Harvard or MIT was running that did this. I used to participate in that, it was cool. This would have been back around 1994-95, I think, before most people knew what the Internet was...

There used to be a website whose name now escapes me that did this, too. They were taken over by Microsoft at some point in maybe 1997 or so and soon were never heard from ever again. I miss the site.

Amazon has something similar with their Recommendations page. I don't find it that useful, though, because it doesn't do a lot to find new music for me. (Gosh, I've rated a lot of Wilco/Son Volt/Uncle Tupelo albums as excellent or good -- you really think I'll like the new Uncle Tupelo anthology?)

Does rateyourmusic do a good job of broadening musical horizons by recommending music you might never have heard of (or heard of, but was unsure whether you'd like)?

By the way, this site does something similar except with movies: http://movielens.umn.edu/

I can't say how accurate or helpful rateyourmusic is because I just recently joined, but there seems to be a lot of activity (i.e. many participants to keep things rolling).

Re: movielens. That's a good site for movies, but an even better one, I think, is www.filmaffinity.com It has a much larger database of films, and it calculates which other users have similar tastes via number of movies rated and rating congruence. It also allows a greater evaluative latitude of 1 to 10 stars.

BUMP

... More like a BANG when it's over 4 years old...



So anyone else a membwer here?

You guys that posted back when are you still active?

Curious to kknow how many 'Talkers are active at RYM.

I'm a member mainly just so I can log my music online. I like looking at the compatability list and seeing who's taste is simliar to mine. You can scan their collections and get ideas for new music. A link to my collection is in my signiture below.

I still visit, and it has improved quite a bit since I first joined years ago. I can't say the recommendations have done much for me, but I'm sure they work better for other people who are more into music than I am.

I love it! I even get involved with it for submissions and corrections. It's my DVD Spot for my music.

http://rateyourmusic.com/~danganet

I only use it to keep track of my collection, and even then there's a lot of stuff in my collection that it doesn't have (j-pop, anime and classical stuff mostly).

Exactly why I like it. In addition to being able to see all the album covers next to each other in alphabetical order which really gets me hot.

How anal retentive am I?

I like scoping the people who are on my compatability list as well as the people on their llists to get new ideas and to see how many other people feel the same way about particular albums. I'm a DJ so that helps sometimes.