How Rate Your Music made me care even more about music

Most of us love to listen to music. Some of us love to record, catalog and categorize every little thing we do every day. At the center of this theoretical Venn diagram is a little website called rateyourmusic.com. This is a website where people can look up albums they’ve listened to, rate them, review them, add them to lists, recommend them to others on the site, and much, much more. This has created a common meeting ground for music nerds all around the globe to congregate.

Personally, I don’t write reviews on RYM, aside from that one time one of my favorite bands from my teens, Twenty One Pilots, released one of their worst albums to date, Scaled and Icy in 2021. Off-topic, but I still regret pre-ordering three different CD copies of the album, because they all had different colored album sleeves, as well as a cassette copy of it. I had invested real time and money into this album, which made it all the more painful when it came out and it sounded like, as a RYM user so eloquently put it, grocery store music. Such great pain, such great misery! Maybe that’s why I felt compelled to write a review about it. If anyone wants a copy of the album, let me know.

Aside from this one instance, I usually stick to rating any albums I listen to, leaving the occassional comment, and using the website as a way to keep track of my physical collection. I also like to look at what others are saying, and where certain albums sit in other people’s minds. Sometimes it helps me to form an opinion on an album I’m not sure about yet, and sometimes it helps my heart rate to speed up significantly when someone expresses an opinion that I consider to be wrong. More than anything though, RYM has increased my overall interest in music. Before I got on the site, I obviously liked music, and kept up with my favorite bands and artists. However, after I joined the website and got more and more involved in the community, I started feeling some kind of weird pressure to keep up with all new releases. Also, RYM made me realise just how much music is actually out there, and I want to listen to all of it. Every day I look for new stuff to listen to and broaden my scope. It basically functions as a massive encyclopedia of everything ever released, with the added social function where everyone all over the world gets to express their opinion on all of that music in real time. All of a sudden I find myself wanting to express a strong opinion in the comment box of a newly released death-metal album that I would not have heard about if it wasn’t at the top of the new music page, by a band I would not care about otherwise. I find that my thoughts and actions around music have changed significantly since joining the site and getting involved. I’m pretty much listening to music from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed whenever I get the chance, and about fifty percent of that is music that I’ve not heard before. Before, I would only listen to music for an hour or two every day, and it would almost always be music that I knew I liked. In that way, a social website has made me change my daily behaviour and even, to an extent, my interests.