Sonemic Reviews 18

I was sexually assaulted and told my life is worthless by the RYM staff. Over a year after posting a review of an artist specifically doing sexual assault towards me in his music I used AI to help me express my trauma from being sexually assaulted by their website's pro rape algorithm. The artist doesn't actually have a reputation outside of these sexual assault communities like RYM and would have never shown up otherwise. They told me because I used A.I. to review I am kicked off their site forever. It is either this review or something made up that I used A.I. to review like 10 singles because that is all I reviewed on their site this year which apparently would be physically impossible to review 10 songs in 2 in a half months using my own brain power and they had to make up that I used A.I. to support their pro baby rape artists on the platform of their victims. Since reviewing people with A.I. is a protected act for people with PTSD and disabilities in the real world but not on their website the only conclusion I can make as their raped baby is that they support rapping my baby and other babies who want to have an opinion. For the rest of eternity I will remember them as a baby rape cell and I hope my grace is enough for them to do the right thing and delete their website and repent. Every second of every day RYM raped me.

Absolutely terrible site. The admins will purposely rate albums to a half to 1 star just to deliberately hurt bands without even listening to a single song. If you have an opinion, keep it to yourself, they are gatekeepers of banning people that don’t even deserve to be banned whatsoever.

RYM sucks and has for a long long time.

As a user of the site since 2014 and one not subject to an inane permanent ban like many other reviewers, RYM has always been a really terrible place for discussing music. It, like many other music forums across the internet, exists only to provide its users an inflated sense of self importance because they listen to cooler music than you. Albums and artists aren't thought of critically outside a 2-sentence long snipe of a review or (god forbid) a comment but moreso as a self-aggrandizing badge of your own "worldly" musical knowledge. People on this site, just like many others, only interact with this content as a way to huff their own farts and each pretend that they're better than the other. God forbid you have a differing opinion either or you'll get a nonsensical wall of text in all lowercase that almost always is trying to justify why your obviously subjective opinion on art can be classified as objectively wrong.

Aside from the toxic and honestly sad userbase, the admins who wrangle these people are just as if not more so. They'll ban you for conflicting opinions or not conforming to their constantly evolving ruleset that continues to make the site less and less usable. Additionally, if you have an appeal system for said ban that requires you manually grovel at a often spiteful and uncaring admin's feet over DMs over (usually) legitimate usage of the site like genre voting, you're doing something incredibly wrong. Even if one did supposedly abuse, and I use that term extremely loosely, the ego you have to have to utilize a system like that is insane. Think: Reddit moderator.

From an artist's perspective, it's not a good place to share music. Unless you're equally awful as other users and have cultivated a group of e-"friends" on this site, you're not going to have an audience. With their new genre-weighting rules, unless you have a group of said people to label your releases with genres for you, your music won't be logged into the site's charts or algorithms. So god forbid you're someone who's not an obvious label plant artist or who doesn't have terminally online RYM friends, because the music you add on there will reach approximately zero people. It used to be the case where you could solely vote for genres and descriptors and have them show up on the artist and album page, then ya know actually getting it to a place where people could see it and vote on it. But how the site treats rating weight combined with getting deweighted at even the slightest inactivity makes this impossible nowadays.

This is without even mentioning RYM's practice of constantly adding new genres and subgenres to the site that only further dilute music and over-categorize things that should have simple descriptions. I swear the admins have made up over 75% of the terms for electronic subgenres on the site and if you don't believe me, just go to the list of subgenres for electronic music and see for yourself. The users even make fun of these additions but do nothing to protest it... it's almost as if the "musical" side of music isn't what they're there for.

RYM does have legitimate uses for finding new music; the way you can customize charts to see albums with less ratings, albums released during certain time periods, etc. makes it very easy to find swaths of music that you're looking for. But at the same time barely something that the simple tag/similar artists system of Last.fm can't do just as well, and I'm pretty sure Last.fm doesn't even have people running the thing with how hands-off it is when it comes to moderation. So ultimately if not for that you're there for the reviews section which I think you can garner how that is from the other wonderful reviews on here.

There really is nothing cool about being a 'music critic.' It requires you to have an, again, inflated sense of self-importance to even think yourself above the artists actually producing this art enough so to tell them what they should and shouldn't do. It should really be nothing more than an innocent hobby you keep to yourself IMO, because talking about music and forming communities is fine but when it comes to this discourse actually affecting the visibility of artists to other people, that's where it becomes a problem. And RateYourMusic, moreso than almost any other site, is extremely guilty of this attitude.

In conclusion, just because Sonemic interviewed people like Stars of the Lid and Ichiko Aoba and plastered it on the front of their site doesn't mean it's any better than any other cesspool music discussion site you've been on. In fact, I bet you it's worse.

These pretentious people critique and judge music solely based on talent, skills, and output. They want to be Anthony Fantano and Pitchfork so bad. They trash anything that is not lyrical or skillful. They are so harsh on music in general.

The IP restrictions on this website are ridiculous, the site is blocked in my country so i need a vpn to access it.
What's the problem? the problem is that %99 of the VPNs i have don't work on it because their IP gets banned straight away, i NEVER have this issue on albumoftheyear.org. Even though the website has awesome genre coverage, what's the point of it if i can't even access it properly?

the interface is outdated, the community is less than pleasant and a lot of features, like the artist map, seem gimmicky. also not a fan of the stupidly strict rules on contributions, including their stylization/capitalization rules. its not 2005 no more folks

Mods are man children who ban you if you have a deviating opinion, or a explanation of a rating system, they also accuse you of being fans of guys you probably don’t even like, and are also huge powertripping immature toddlers who’ll ban anyone at the slightest mistake, just use AOTY and spudnik, 0/10.

It's pretty cool. In fact it's a great place to discover more of the music you love. Just don't get into an argument about subgenres. Also don't take the ratings too seriously, the site is rife with pseuds and ageing hippies.

They banned me randomly without providing any valid reason.

Die mit großem Abstand beste Musikdatenbank und -community, die es gibt! Premium lohnt sich wirklich sehr.

Clunky, bad moderation, and useless bans. Most of the good old reviews have been deleted. You'll get banned for no reason, or the stupidest reason. I got banned one time because they thought my IP was "hacking". They didn't even show my real IP!

Used this website daily from 2003 until 2008 when my account got banned because the owner thought the sources I used for added releases (Discogs). You literally can't have a better source for information.
In those years I added over 50K releases, corrected info, added tracklists etc. And this is my reward. Shameful moderation. Since then I've been using Discogs but there the ratings are inflated and the artist' pages are ugly and bland, you can't see which releases are the best/most popular.
Wish I still had my RYM account with all my ratings so I didn't have to re-download so many albums because I can't remember everything anymore.
After my departion, I've noticed that a lot more contributors were banned as well. Also with dumb reasons. Why? Why would you ban the backbone of your website? Is that how you wanna treat people?

I'd been a user of RYM for over a decade. But I just can't stand it anymore. If I were rating the RYM of 2014, I might give it a 3 or 4. But today, in 2024, it's devolved significantly into a very ugly and oppressive place, worthy of the worst possible rating. And this is because the mods and admins have become unbearably strict and authoritarian. They keep adding more draconian rules that suck all the life, variety, and individuality out of the site. Rock music is probably the most popular genre on RYM. But ironically, the anal-retentive and humorless owners & mods are the least "rock and roll" people on the planet.

There used to be a lot of cool and interesting contributors to the site. People who had fun and engaging profiles, compelling and/or humorous reviews, and uniquely thought-provoking lists. But now almost all those people are gone (and their lists & reviews deleted). Many of them were banned for petty and arbitrary reasons. And the rest of them have voluntarily abandoned their accounts after years of increasing harassment from the fascistic moderation team.

Lets look at the review system, for example. Ostensibly, anyone can join RYM and write their own personal reviews of any album, single, or film. But over time, almost all of the best and most interesting reviews would get unpublished or deleted. This is because the rules for what counts as an "acceptable" review on RYM became ridiculously strict and rigid. It's literally to the point where the most famous professional rock critics of the 70s/80s/90s (Lester Bangs, JD Considine, David Marsh, etc) would not have their reviews accepted on RYM. Too much creativity and individuality. No, can't have that! In order to be acceptable to RYM standards, your review must fit inside the most bland, sterile, cookie-cutter box. It's gotten so bad that if you look at the RYM reviews that are still visible, you'll see that most of them could have been written by Chat GPT. It's pathetic.

But whatever you do, don't you dare complain. This is because the main owner (Sharifi) and his moderation team are the most petty and vindictive people on the internet. If you complain, they retaliate and bully you. They attack your character. They gaslight you. They constantly accuse you of "bad faith" just for wanting the freedom to be yourself. Or they send their friends to troll your page with abusive comments. Then they punish you with warnings or suspensions based entirely on their false allegations. It's disgusting and inexcusable.

Message to the owners: Stop banning the most interesting members. Stop unpublishing the most interesting reviews. Stop deleting the most interesting lists. Stop trying to force the entire community into cookie-cutter mini versions of yourselves. Let a diversity of styles and opinions flourish, instead of suppressing them. Then, and only then, you might eventually have a site that's worth coming back to.

Świetna skarbnica wiedzy na temat muzyki.

I've used this site since 2008 and in that time it has undergone massive changes. But one thing is the same: there is an absolutely massive amount of music and movies catalogued on the site. User reviews. Lists. Forums. It is a treasure trove if you look far enough. Absolutely indispensable.

After being a contributing member since 2006, I was banned from Rate Your Music. I had between 30,000-40,000 contributions there. I'm always searching for new-to-me music.

As most regular users, I had pics and quotes matching my personality on my personal page. Never trolled anyone. Didn't post on people's boards.
Their admins are going nuts with cancelling "unapproved opinions". Their killing themselves with this nonsense.

My sin: One of the quotes on my page was, "it's not enough to not be communist, you must be anti-communist as well".

I know of several other examples of long-time, good-standing contributors getting suspended or banned for ridiculous things. It's turning into a big clique of robots.

The amount of effort the community puts into this website is amazing, but the lack of proper design updates/moderation holds it back.

The site is what it is due to the users, but the admin don't care.

Garbage owner and mods who treat the userbase like crap. Put hours and hours of your own time into helping to line the greedy owner's pockets by adding content, and because you have a tiff with the friend of a moderator, you'll get the ass, even if you're a paid subscriber and have given this con your money. The owner, Hossein Sharifi, doesn't reply to your concerns. Whatever you do, do not subscribe to this website.