I started using RYM back in May, and I've been liking it a lot so far.
I've only really been making lists, rating stuff I know, and track what albums I listen to.

Are there other features that are cool to get into?

Feel free to add me @Bonejammer.

There's an automated recommendations system that gives you a list of 100 albums you might like based on what you've already rated. If you have a Spotify account and connect it to RYM, you can even generate a playlist based on those recommended albums.

I'm on this page on a weekly basis. IMO the strongest thing RYM has going for it is the ability for users to leave ratings without writing a full review, like the archives requires. That give wayyyy more data on what albums are popular and trending. If you spring for the paid version of RYM, which I'm considering doing, it gives you even more filtering and sorting options.

I used to catalogue my collection with RYM but the queues can take forever to update edits so there are releases that aren't on the site or outdated information. I tried adding and editing a lot of stuff but they all got rejected after like over a month of me waiting so I just gave up after that. I did use RYM frequently though to discover a lot of albums when I was first trying to get into the various subgenres and did do by checking the top album charts.

Yeah, I don't like the system for submitting or changing releases/bands/info. It feels cumbersome because several people (?) have to sign off on their validity. Though also cumbersome, I think Discogs' model where other users can challenge the validity after submission is better.

As for recommendations and the top lists, I like the features, but they feel like they have a bias. Like once an album reaches a certain place on the top lists it has a self-reinforcing effect because more people will get exposed to it.

Yes, whenever I see an album that has a high rating I force myself to like it because I am incapable of subjective opinion.

The opposite also happens, when a metal album reaches the tops the score gets bombed by people who don't like metal.

RYM is wacky as fuck, as a community on a whole. It's pretty great though when it comes to cataloging what you own in regards to a physical collection though. I use it a lot for that, along with discogs, to keep up with my purchases ect.

Agreed. I don't bother adding stuff to RYM anymore because of the stupid amount of time it takes for approvals to go through. Even adding a cover to a reissue takes at least a few months, because they always seem to insist on some kind of dialogue to prove the image is valid, which is totally unnecessary. It's a shame because it's a decent site otherwise.

Care to elaborate?

Correct. Using post as a description should mean the next iteration of the genre, like post punk, post rock etc. Just because a genre mixes elements of post rock doesn't mean it suddenly becomes a post genre. Post black metal used to mean the industrial black n roll stuff from the late 90s, which makes way more sense just throwing post rock elements in.

As for RYM, been on it for 15 years I'd say. It's pretty great for it's metal stuff, and it's one of the only place that end of year lists include metal albums. Saying that, the comments section for some of the bigger, non metal genres are usually an absolute sesspit of people been unhappy other people dont like their favourite albums. There's a huge amount of snobbery and self righteous assholes in some of the other genres.

There seemed to be a huge influx of Anthony Fantano fans a few years ago, so like some of his reviews, if it's experimental, and more than likely hip-hop, it's way overrated. People on there seem to think music should constantly be pushing forward to the detriment of the quality.

Never organised my collection or anything on there, way too much effort. Discogs is easier.

Sure, I just mean that the site has wacky dynamics due to the multi faceted genres and fans from different subcultures. I always feel like i'm transported to bizaro world when I read in depth analyses of boy band's and teen idol like pop stars' music. There are also goofy music genre feuds that happen, along with your standard internet elitists spouting off constantly.

That's just the internet, and music fandom, overall. I'm sure a non-metal fan would surmise pretty much the exact same thing from this community.

Oh, I'm sure. It just feels more amplified with RYM because fans of different genres from wildly opposite ends of the spectrum collide in one place.

one of the big problem of rym is the utter pedantic tendency to add every subniche as a separate genre.

And they get a lot of stuff wrong because people not familiar with metal genres (just an example) vote on those too. It's certainly a place with little to no knowledge of metal and it tends to get everything wrong about niche subgenres.

One example of this is how that new Ashenspire got compared a lot by the RYM community with Black Country, New Road which is a band that sounds nothing like Ashenspire. Have these people never heard of A Forest of Stars? There are of course countless examples of this stuff, this is just one example.

It's a good site for discovering music for sure. But I left it recently, owing to the shitty, Twitteresque social-media like dynamics in the community, it's a weird place and not weird in the way I can really tolerate. I didn't really need to delete my account but I felt it did something useful. And yes, the pedantry over genres is frustrating. I LOL'd when they added Dissonant Death Metal as a real genre. And it's difficult to argue otherwise against people there because their criteria for how "legit" a genre is is based off on how often it gets mentioned on the internet, without regard for context, how people treat descriptions of music genres etc.

Yes, technical death metal and dissonant death metal now basically overlap like 50% of the time.

The thing I like more from RYM is the quantity of lists and rankings. Maybe is the best way to know unknown bands from different musical styles,but it has some issues.for example you can see some trolls who enter to the site only to give low or bad ratings to bands they hate or dislike. So far I have discovered many bands,and I have only two months as a active member.

My fav feature is that when you follow a bunch of cool dudes, you can simply ignore all the "public" lists and ratings and check what your metal mates find interesting this year. I follow like 30-40 metal dudes and their top 5 top albums for 2022 are Artificial Brain, Ultha, Immo, White Ward and Ashenspire - pretty competent. So yeah, whenever I miss something important I can simply check what my dudes have praised and I'm up to date.

Genres are a bit silly, like war metal, disso death or atmospheric sludge being taken waaaaay too seriously. I've seen some arguments whether an album is sludge or atmo sludge, which was quite amusing. Either way, genres can be widely ignored and the ability to check if I already have the cd before I buy another one is nice.

I really like RYM. They let you post reviews of 2-3 sentences and it's really user friendly. So, I basically aim to review every album I listen. I have like 1,500 reviews over there.

Do you not think brutal death metal is real? Or technical death metal? Complaining about pedantry there given how this site operates is pretty hilarious. Both sites have their positives and their negatives. RYM has a genre queue which requires you to enter a submission for new genres, linking to notable sources that demonstrate there is a viable case for the genre, and 3/4 of voters have to approve the submission for it to pass. They are notoriously stringent on allowing new metal-related subgenres through. They don't always get everything right, and the community in general has some philosophical differences with this site, but it's pretty decent for a much more all-encompassing music archival site.

This is a double-edged sword though. Some bands/albums suffer from being ranked higher and/or from being popular, as some will consider them weaker relatively to where they are ranked, and it might lead to a number of people giving them bad ratings because of their popularity, or because they feel that these albums are overrated.

I remember the debut In The Woods... was in the top 1000 best albums ever and now it's like 5000 or so. And it's not the only case like this with metal albums, I get the feeling that there are a lot of people in that community who actively downvote metal-related releases because it's a type of music they don't like.

Hell, just today I saw in RYM the comment of a user who considered "Sunbather" and "Teethed Glory and Injury" as the best black metal albums of the last decade and when you went to his profile out of his 5k votes only 4 were related to black metal. How can he speak so confidently about a genre that clearly doesn't interest him?

Yeah, that's also not surprising. When people who hate an entire genre of music see records from that genre starting to creep up the rankings, they give it a 0 to make it fall down the rankings.

I saw someone praise the voting without writing a review system that RYM has compared to MA, and it definitely has it's advantages, but it also has significiant disadvantages, namely because it allows haters and disingenuous people to bomb the ratings of albums they clearly never listened to, or that they never gave a fair chance to, just because they hate the entire genre.

I was listening to some hip hop for once yesterday and dove into RYM's list of hip hop sub-genres.
There's a lot of pseudo-genres in there, based entirely on geographical origin (East Coast vs West Coast Hip Hop, French Hip Hop, Southern Hip Hop) or on lyrical contents (Conscious Hip Hop, Political Hip Hop, Gangsta Rap etc).
I don't know hip hop at all so there might be more to it, but it just seems weird to me to include these as separate genres.

Looking at metal's sub-genres on RYM, it doesn't seem nearly as prevalent - As an example, Pirate Metal (thankfully) isn't listed, and Norwegian Black Metal isn't separated from Black Metal.
I still don't agree that Pagan Black Metal or Viking Metal are actual genres though.

One of the more annoying things I’ve noticed on RYM lately is every old crust punk record has been tagged with the stenchcore genre. I don’t really see the point in this, to me that is pretty much like giving these records 2 different genre tags for the same thing.

It seperates the D-beaty or metalcory side from the slower apocalyptic Amebix stuff, so there's some value to it. Not exactly a high level usefulness, but as far as quick narrowing down without needing to see name drops in reviews or a similar artist function like on here it does have some value.

Generally speaking I don't think they're that bad on the metal side actually, they don't have many hyper focuses there. Nothing like every japanese d-beat band getting tagged as burning spirits there or every african rock band getting a genre based off its country of origin.

East and west coast hip hops are very well established scenes outside of RYM with very distinct influences and general characteristics.

As far as I can tell that's just how hip hop genres are named. I find it SUPER annoying but they're not using them in place of musical descriptors, that scene just doesn't give a shit about sonic terms. I mean there's like, gangsta rap and boom bap... pretty much everything else is named after the regional scene.

I sort of assumed as much, but the RYM descriptions only describe them as being origin/theme based - Would be really cool if they at least included some description of the stylistic differences.

Yeah, regional names really arent as common when it comes to metal, but there are still a few examples of it though. The best examples I can think of would be stuff like Swedish death metal (swedeath), Gothenburg metal, Hellenic black metal, and USPM. There is something very distinctive in the sound of these subgenres, and it's also associated with a region, so it makes sense to name it like this, even if, in the longrun, it can become limitating (like there is nothing stopping a canadian band from making gothenburg inspired death metal, or from a band from Guatemala to make US style power metal.

As for hip-hop, I'm not knowledgeable enough to really tell, but fans of the genre will tell you that there are real stylistic differences between east and west coast hip-hop.

Definitely true, just looking at death metal each regional scene often has its own aesthetic or sound, but then RYM aren't distinguishing between them.
The only reason I brought it up was that it's weird to me that RYM would distinguish between those sub-genres, but not do anything to describe what stylistic differences there are

Uh yeah, I don't know why they wouldn't. With how well hip-hop records are ranking on RYM, you'd think they would try to be very detailled in their genre description for hip-hop subgenres.

To me the excessive categorization is unnecessary, at least for me it kinda takes away the mystery of discovering it all on your own when it's all in front of you, if I know walking in that this is a real fruity sounding melodic death album, it kinda just takes away the fun of when you hear something you immediately can't stand on any level, it's fun to get pissed off about it and complain about it, I just kinda like being a little blind going into an album, I don't need to know every little thing y'know.

And I can't tell if it's done just to make everything sound more exclusive and grand than it really is, or if people can't wrap their brain around this band plays the same genre as Rotting Christ, but doesn't mean they sound like rotting Christ.

I haven't even ever frequented their community besides sometimes I'll look at lists, but I never end up even doing anything with the information, just kinda a way to pass the time more than anything, but I really don't like much of any music discussion places besides this one, there ends up being way more analytical discussion around here, and I can only imagine especially being a generalized music website like that youre probably only a stones throw away from a lot of really obnoxious people that have utter shit taste in music and are pricks about it, or people that just aren't as interested in the music the same way real passionate people are, id rather just stick within the confines of the metal fanbase when it comes to music

I completely agree with this. For me it's to the point where I don't even listen to pre-release singles or watch movie trailers anymore. There's nothing quite like the surprise of a new media experience when you have no idea what you're getting yourself into.

Well, you don't have to look at the tags before listening. You can listen first and check those out later if you don't want it "spoiled". But there are tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of albums released every year. No one on the planet has time to listen to all of them, and often I'm looking for particular sounds, and even then the tags are often not specific enough, because lots of very different sounding bands can have the exact same tags.

When I go to discover something on RYM I'm unlikely to search for anything more specific than say 'doom metal'. But I can appreciate that the sub-subgenres and descriptors are valuable for some people. I get enough of the going in blind by playing YouTube links posted around various forums and social media, but I rarely give anything more than a brief chance to grow on me as there's just too much of it.

I imagine hip hop would be way too poorly organised if it didn't have the regional & lyric-based subgenres mentioned above. The lyrics are a more significant element than in metal, and I suppose the artists working on the same themes tended to influence each other and establish something of a common sound.