History and Features
Rate Your Music was founded on December 24, 2000 by Atlanta resident Hossein Sharifi. Unlike Discogs, focusing on electronic music, Rate Your Music was in its beginning more rock oriented, before gradually integrating every other genre. The main idea of the website is to allow the users to add albums, EPs, singles, videos, bootlegs to the database and to rate them. The rating system uses a scale of minimum a half-star (or 0.5 points) to maximum five stars (or 5 points). In this manner, Rate Your Music bears resemblance to a Wiki, as all of the databases content is generated jointly by the registered user community (artists, releases, biographies,…); however, the majority of new, edited content must be approved by a moderator to prevent virtual vandalism.
RYM 1.0, the first version of the website, allowed the users to rate and catalog releases, as well as to write reviews, create lists and add artists and releases to the database. Over time, other features were progressively added, like cover art, a community board (forums) or private messaging. On August 7, 2006, RYM 2.0, a completely new version of the website was launched, introducing new features like the possibility to add tracklists, labels, catalog numbers, concerts or venues.
As a result of rising expenses, the website ceased relying solely on donations in 2006 and began receiving revenue from other sources. Namely, the two changes were commission-based links to online music retailers, and Google AdSense links (which registered users can elect not to view). The user response to these changes was overwhelmingly positive, because of the democratic nature of the decision, which was openly proposed and discussed on the website before implementation, and the relatively unobtrusive nature of the links.
In May 2009, Rate Your Music started to add films to its database.
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