Rate Your Music - thousands of album reviews
RateYourMusic.com is an online community of music fans that review and rate music. RYM has thousands of users with millions of ratings and reviews. It is rather amazing how much depth there is in the RYM review catalog. Abbey Road has been rated 3,680 times and has 433 reviews. The latest Pearl Jam album has 587 ratings and 69 written reviews. Naturally, some of the reviews are your typical one word fanboy reviews: 'awesome' - but many of the reviews are well written, detailed explorations of the album - such as these reviews for In the Aeroplay Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel.
With
all of these reviews and ratings, RYM can give us all sorts of nifty
charts - such as top albums (Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited is the
alltime top album according to RYM). worst albums (William Hung is #2 on
this list) and Most owned albums,
Once you've rated a number of albums, RYM will give you recommendations based upon those ratings, as well as connect you to other users who have similar musical tastes.
RYM is a super source of reviews
for albums - this is an excellent resource for music information
retrieval researchers that are interested in data mining the words that
surround the music. The only thing RYM lacks is a good web api to
make it easy to extract the reviews for a specific album.
Well, when there is a lack of API you can always exploit their RSS feeds syndication. I'm doing this since April, 2005 and it works fine :-) Oscar.
Posted by oscar on November 27, 2006 at 02:26 PM EST #