Wiki

These are the principles the website is built on.

Simple ≫ Complex. We keep things simple, at the expense of precision. Progressive music is an art form whose essential medium is the studio album, so we do not distinguish between versions: vinyl, re-releases, deluxe editions. There is only one Dark Side of the Moon.

Community ≫ Editors and Curators. The site is a collaborative effort of like-minded users. Apart from the trust rank, which counters abuse, all charts and lists are generated from the users' raw tag assignments.

Tags ≫ Reviews. We love reviews, but they take a long time to write. Tag assignments are much faster, and we want to prioritize them.

Tag a Little Every Day ≫ Binge Tagging. Details are hard to remember, so assign tags while you listen, but do not overdo it. Make a habit of the basic tags and be more detailed now and then.

The Best Music ≫ Completionism. There is far more music than anyone can hear in a lifetime, so we focus on the best. Add, rate and tag your favorites first and give them the most detail; lower tier albums need only a rating and basic tags.

The database is organised the way a record shelf is. At the top are the artists – bands and solo performers. Every artist has a discography of releases: studio albums, EPs, singles, live albums, compilations, soundtracks and so on, each with its year and cover art. A release in turn consists of tracks, the individual songs or pieces on it.

Artists, releases and tracks can all have videos attached – links to performances, official clips or full-track uploads on video platforms. Videos can be rated and commented on just like the music itself, and the best of each year surface on the Top Videos page.

So when you look something up, you always land somewhere in this chain: an artist page lists their releases, a release page lists its tracks, and a track page lists its videos. Ratings and tags exist at every level, which is what powers the various charts and rankings.

Once you are signed in, every release can carry your personal collection status – a one-word verdict that says how the release stands in relation to your collection. A release has at most one collection status at a time, and you can change it whenever your opinion moves on:

• Noticed – you gave it a fair chance, but it is not really for you, so it stays outside your collection.
• Liked – you like it without owning it: part of your extended collection.
• Wishlist – you want to buy it.
• Collection – you own it.
• Sold – you owned it once and have sold it.
• Hidden – it is not for you, and we'll stop suggesting it.

Each collection status doubles as a list: your wishlist, collection, liked, noticed and hidden releases are simply the releases carrying that status, so your library builds itself as you record verdicts. Collection statuses are also how the recommendations learn: setting one tells us what you think of a pick and makes room for a fresh one.

Your bookmarks are your listening notepad: the releases and tracks you marked as interesting and want to spend time with. Anyone who listens to a lot of music knows how hard it is to keep track of tips from friends, reviews and recommendations – your bookmarks are where they wait for you.

A bookmark is independent of a release's collection status. You can mark a release as noticed, like it or wishlist it while you are still exploring – it stays bookmarked – and when you are done with it, you remove the bookmark yourself. That way your bookmarks always reflect what you are currently exploring, not what you have already decided on.

The main way to bookmark something is the bookmark button on your recommendations, but you can also bookmark releases and tracks directly from their pages. Members see their bookmarks as a row of covers right in the navigation, so the next thing to explore is never far away.

Whenever you listen to a release, a track or a video, you can log a play with the familiarity icon – one click, nothing to fill in. If you like, you can also note how thoroughly you played it (a skim, a partial play or a complete play), in what situation – focused at home, on your commute, at the office, out running, and so on – what you played it from (the CD or the record you own, a streaming service, YouTube) and what you listened through – headphones, studio monitors, the hi-fi, the laptop's own speaker: either right away behind add more info, or afterwards from the list of plays below it, where every play you can still delete carries a dropdown for each. A video is always a YouTube video, so a video play does not ask what it was played from – but it asks what you watched it on (a phone, a tablet, a computer screen, a TV, a projector), as does a play of a video release or of a track on one. Your plays appear on the public timelines, and the plays page shows what the most active members have been playing.

Out of your plays grows your familiarity with each item: a simple ladder from "unfamiliar" over "played once" and "played a few times" up to "10+ plays". Every play you log moves the level along, and you can also set it directly – useful for music you already know inside out from before you joined. A track you have not recorded a level for shows the level you gave the whole release, until you set one for the track itself.

Familiarity is more than a statistic: you are asked to record how well you know something before you rate or tag it. That keeps the ratings honest – a verdict after ten listens carries different weight than a first impression – and it helps you remember which releases deserve another spin before you make up your mind.

The heart of the website is what members say about the music. Everything is rated on a scale from 0 to 100, divided into seven named tiers from S – "Stellar" at the top down to F – "Awful". You can rate whole releases as well as individual tracks. The sections below break the tiers down in detail, show how your judgement of the music and your personal taste get a rating each, and explain how the individual ratings are combined into the aggregate scores you see on charts and rankings.

Tags describe what the music is, rather than how good it is: its genre and subgenres, styles, moods and – this being a website with a focus on progressive music – how "prog" it is. You don't need to be an expert: through the tags all members assign together, the community as a whole settles each release's genre and character. The tags page lists the tags we currently support.

Progressive music has a history, and every release sits somewhere in it. Beside what a release is (its genre) and how progressive it is (its progressiveness), you can say where in its genre's life it stands. Three questions, three independent answers – and the badge words them in that order: Prog Symphonic Rock Revival is symphonic rock, progressive, in its Revival phase – a phase reading behind the genre it carries on, where an earlier one qualifies it from the front, Classic Prog Symphonic Rock. The Genres and Phases page (Alpha) plays the whole history out year by year, genre by genre, with the albums that stand for each phase – the prog genres marked, since not every genre with a history here is progressive.

The Prog Genres

Not every genre with a history here is progressive. A prog genre is one with a progressive form of its own – symphonic rock, Canterbury, krautrock, zeuhl, RIO, fusion, prog metal, Neo-Prog, post rock, djent – and is marked as one by the site. A genre that has years of its own but no such mark – hard rock, AOR, thrash, the blues strains, jazz and its schools – is a style with a history, not a prog genre. The mark says which genres the Genres and Phases page counts as progressive and which come first on the phases tab; it says nothing about phases, which every genre with years of its own has, on prog and non-prog releases alike. Jazz is the clearest case: its calendar is jazz's own, from the first recordings of 1917, and the jazz that is progressive is a genre of its own, jazz-fusion.

The calendar's grid is the decades. On it the charts tint the classic prog period: the years in which the original prog genres, those born with progressive rock in the late sixties, had their classic periods. It is read off those genres' own years rather than set by hand, so it moves when they do. Where a genre's phases begin and end is the genre's own business, and comes next.

Neo-Prog is a genre here, not a phase, born in the eighties. The "neo" prefix never settled anywhere else in prog as a period marker (nobody says neo-Canterbury), and Neo-Prog names a style rather than a period: Pendragon in 2011 and Marillion in 1983 are both Neo-Prog, which a phase could never say. So it has phases of its own, Classic through the eighties and nineties and Revival, Modern or Continuation since.

The Phases

Every genre passes through the same steps, but on a calendar of its own: a classic period with a first and a last year, a few proto years before it, and a retro year some way after it. From the last classic year on there are two readings of the same years: the faithful one, which takes the classic sound up again, and the transforming one, which takes the classic genre as a foundation and rebuilds it with the current means.

A year on a seam belongs to both of its neighbours – the first classic year is Proto or Classic, the last one Classic or anything after – and your ear decides. A genre without proto years has no Proto; one without a retro year keeps the faithful reading at Revival, as art rock does, where nearly everything after 1983 is Modern anyway.

Continuation is the sixth phase: a founding band's own later work, whichever year it falls in, so that a 2021 album by a band from 1969 is not filed as its own tribute act. In front of the genre it read as a classification rather than a label; behind it, it reads like any other phase, so such a release is spelled out as, say, Prog Symphonic Rock Continuation – but only where the badge is spelled out in full, since it says something about the band rather than about the music. In a list row or under a cover it reads as if no phase were set.

Two things follow. Modern is a relationship, not a date: a 1997 Radiohead album is Modern art rock, a 2021 Wobbler album is Retro symphonic rock. Revival and Retro are the same faithfulness at two distances: Revival while bringing the sound back is still a cause – the eighties revival that Neo-Prog grew out of, the nineties one of Änglagård and The Flower Kings – and Retro once it is an accepted period style. Where that line falls is each genre's retro year.

Each Genre's Years

The periods as they stand, one bar per genre with years of its own, earliest first, on a grid of decades with the classic prog period behind them. The years are curated by hand and are what the phases tab goes by; hover a stretch for its years. Only genres a release is given are drawn, never a main genre; a genre that is not drawn has no years of its own and takes no phase (techno is not prog electronic, punk is not prog rock).

Assigning a Phase

Open a release's dialog, pick its genres (the musical note) and then their Genres part – it is always there, and asks you for a familiarity with the release first where you have none, since a genre is heard rather than looked up. Say how progressive the release is first, then pick its main genre, and out of that genre's own list the genre it is – one of its corners, Progressive Rock or Symphonic Rock, or Plain Rock for a rock record that is none of them. The main genre only leads you to that list: it is not assigned itself, but follows from the genre, as the family it belongs to. A genre of no family sits beside the main genres in the first list and is picked on its own, and None (Genre-Defying) – the answer that no genre fits at all – is the first genre's alone, since nothing stands beside it. The three scales decide what that list holds: a genre that contradicts them is left off it, the genres that say what they say come first, and one you hold from before stays on show to be cleared. Each button is named the way the release will read with that genre on it – the modifiers you have ranked, the level word and the genre, Heavy Prog Hard Rock – so picking is a matter of reading rather than of imagining. The wording itself – Symphonic Prog for symphonic rock on a prog release, Prog-Adj Rock for rock on a prog-adjacent one – comes from the prog status, the genre and the phase together, the way the badge words them, and that is what the summary line over the pickers and the buttons of your genres page say. Then the phase, where the genre has one. Each genre waits behind a button – the primary one first, then a second and a third for where one does not tell the whole story – and once its phase is settled it folds to a line naming the pick, with a button to change it and one to remove it. Only the phases the release year leaves open on that genre are offered: a 1967 symphonic prog record can only be Proto, a 1969 one Proto or Classic, a 1975 one only Classic, a 1985 one Revival or Modern (or a founder's Continuation), a 2020 one Retro or Modern – and a release older than a genre's first proto year takes none. The prog status has no say in it: a 1985 hard rock record is Revival hard rock whether or not it is prog, and the badge says so. A phase you set before a genre's years moved stays on show even where it is no longer offered, so you can see it and clear it.

The phase rides on your genre tag: it shows on your review, it is kept when you change the genre's strength elsewhere, and it goes when you take the genre off. What the community as a whole says is aggregated the way tags are – weighted by trust rank and familiarity – and shown beside the genre on the release.

Three questions decide whether a record belongs on this site at all, and each is a tag of its own with a scale from 0 to 100. Together they are the main modifiers:

• Progressiveness – the elaborate, through-composed approach. Read as Prog from 60, Prog-Adjacent from 40 and Non-Prog below, which is the word the badge carries.
• Avant-Garde – a tradition: the line from Zappa, Henry Cow and the RIO festival to Zorn, Mr. Bungle and Kayo Dot, music that belongs to a school of breaking form.
• Experimental – a process: trying things whose outcome is uncertain, whatever tradition the record otherwise sits in, from Faust to Radiohead to Chat Pile.

They are independent of one another – a record can be any combination of the three – and they are the reason the three sit apart from the eighty-odd adjectives the vocabulary also holds. You set them in one place, on a scale each, at the top of the Genres part of a release's genres action; they are not offered in the tag table beside Melodic and Dissonant at the bottom of it, because the genre you pick just under them has a say in what they are.

Some Genres Imply a Level

Genres and the main modifiers work together rather than side by side. A genre can carry a flag on each of the three, curated per genre, saying one of three things: that a record of this genre is that by definition, that it is not, or – the usual case – nothing at all. Progressive Metal is progressive by definition and says nothing about the other two; RIO and Avant-Garde Metal are both progressive and avant-garde; the two Experimental genres are experimental and leave progressiveness to you; hard rock says nothing about anything.

The flag settles whether, and you still say how much. When you assign such a genre, each criterion it has a flag for is written on your own rows: a value you never set is filled in with a plain yes (60) or a plain no (0), and a value you did set is brought to 40 – where the two bands meet – only if it sits on the wrong side of it, and is left exactly as it is inside the band the genre allows. So picking Progressive Metal on a record you had called Non-Prog makes it Prog-Adjacent, not Prog: the genre is entitled to say the record is progressive at all, and how progressive stays yours.

The same rule read backwards is what the editor shows you before you pick anything. The side of a scale a genre you already hold leaves no room for is greyed, with that genre named as the reason, and a tap in it lands on 40. And the genres a slot offers are those that do not contradict what the scales say – no prog genre on a release you have placed as Non-Prog, no RIO on one you have placed below 40 on avant-garde – with the genres that say what the scales say at the head of the list. A genre you already hold stays on show whatever the scales say, so you can always clear it. In other words: a genre is offered exactly when assigning it would not move a value you have set.

The Other Modifiers

The adjectives that qualify a genre – Heavy, Symphonic, Space, Cosmic – are the other modifiers, and the same Genres part ranks them, just under the three scales: you pick the word that applies most as your primary modifier, then a second under it, and so on. The ranking is stored as the tag's strength, strongest first, and the badge words the primary one. The genre buttons under the modifiers are named the way the release will read once that genre is on it – pick Heavy, hold the release at 60 or more on progressiveness, and the Hard Rock button reads Heavy Prog Hard Rock – less any word the genre already says for itself, since Avant-Garde Avant-Garde Metal is nobody's idea of a badge. Those qualifying words are the same in front of every button, so they are drawn faintly and the genre name is not: the names are what you are choosing between, and the rest is there to be read rather than read past.

A rating is one number, but it is rarely one reason. Some aspects of a release pull it up for you and others drag it down: maybe the drumming is worth a tier on its own, maybe the production costs it two. Those are stances, and you can record them right in the rating editor, for releases and for individual tracks.

A stance always targets one of the curated aspects we maintain - like "Dynamic Production", "Brickwalled Production" or "Cheesy Lyrics". The aspects themselves are neutral descriptions, and everyone picks from the same curated list: the loud production that earns a tier from one member costs another two, and because the words are shared, those takes add up into meaningful counts instead of a pile of free-text variants.

The editor offers your personal set of aspects: every aspect you have taken a stance on before, plus anything you add on the spot - most of us keep coming back to a relatively small, stable set of aspects, and this way they are one click away on everything you rate.

You say how much an aspect moved you in the unit your rating already uses: rating tiers. The scale runs -2 tiers / -1 tier / no change / +1 tier / +2 tiers – so "-1 tier" says the production kept the release off the tier it would otherwise have reached, and "-2 tiers" that it cost it two. "No change" is a stance as well: the aspect is there and worth naming, it just did not move your verdict. Leaving an aspect unset is the different statement that it does not apply here at all.

The rating editor shows this as a table: one row per aspect, one column per step. Alongside your own aspects it automatically lists every aspect other members have already marked on the release, so you can weigh in on what the community is discussing.

Because a stance is specific ("Brickwalled Production", not just "bad production"), other members can tell whether your reservation would even apply to them: release and track pages show what lifted the music in members' ratings and what held it back. Aspects that moved nobody stay out of those lines. Tracks carry their own stances.

Those lines are ordered by trust, the same way the aggregated tags are: a stance from someone who knows the music well and has earned trust reaches the front. The numbers stay plain head counts, so what you read is still how many members hold a take, not a score.

When all those individual ratings and tags are combined, not every vote weighs the same. Each member has a trust rank, and it is simply the weight their ratings, tags and stances carry in the aggregate: a vote from a member with a rank of 6 pulls six times as hard as one from a member with a rank of 1. It never silences anyone, and it does not change what we count – where the site says how many members rated or tagged something, that is a plain head count of people.

The rank is calculated automatically, once an hour, from exactly one thing: on how many different days you rated a release in the last 300 days. Rating twenty albums in one evening counts as one day, and so does rating one. Fifty such days reach the top of the automatic scale, which is 8; new accounts start at 1. Nobody sets the number by hand, and it is not a judgment of anyone's taste.

Because the window rolls along with you, a rank is not a permanent title: stop rating for a while and it drops back on its own, and it picks up again when you return. That is deliberate – it rewards the habit of tagging a little every day rather than one weekend of binge tagging.

Your rank is the starting point for a single vote. It is scaled by your familiarity with the release (a partial play counts for a fifth of it, your full rank applies from ten plays on), and low ratings count somewhat less than high ones, since a rating near the bottom usually comes from someone who did not spend much time with the music. A vote that counts at all keeps a weight of at least 1. Outright abuse is handled separately: banned accounts, spam accounts and guest accounts are skipped entirely.

There are many possible ways to calculate an aggregate rating from a list of individual ratings, which is what we obviously need to do for tracks and releases. The simplest is to compute an average value. But we think that this does not lead to the best results. Instead we compute the median value, or in other words, the typical value that is assigned by most users.

There are two additional things we do. First, not every vote weighs the same: each one enters the calculation with a weight built from the member's trust rank – recalculated automatically from how regularly they rate releases – and from how well they know the music in question.

The other thing we do when calculating the release ratings: Instead of just taking an average or mean value from all tag assignments, we treat each calculation like a voting session in order to find the favorite value. To do that, we first determine the favorite tier group (low, mid, high). Then within the winning group, we determine the favorite tier. Then within that tier, we determine the favorite sub range. Then finally within that range we take the median value.

This approach solves a problem that plagues larger rating websites: the more users "vote" on a release, the more the average gets dragged down to mediocrity even for masterpieces. At RYM, for instance, hardly any popular release scores above 4.0 (out of 5), because popular releases attract many users who give really low ratings out of spite or because they dislike the genre. The voting approach ignores those votes until they reach a tipping point (majority), so true masterpieces retain their high rating.

When you browse the releases ordered by overall rank, the system needs to sort the releases in a way which takes into account the aggregated rating as well as the number of ratings. The simplest way to do that would be to sort by the product of these values. In practice we found that this boosts releases with a lot of ratings too much, so we chose to use a logarithmic value of the number of ratings instead, lessening the boosting effect somewhat.

So do not be surprised when in a list of ranked releases (or tracks) the aggregate rating of the releases appears to be unsorted, since items with lower aggregate ratings can outrank more highly rated items if the number of ratings is substantially higher. That number is a plain head count of the members whose vote counted; the trust weights described above shape the aggregate rating itself, not the count.

Rankings are the other way to say what you love – and for many people the more natural one. Instead of giving each release a number on the 0–100 scale, you put your favorites in order: your top albums of a year, a month, a decade or a single artist, and likewise your favorite tracks and videos. Not everyone thinks in scores, but almost everyone can say which album was their number one this year – ranking asks exactly that, and nothing more.

Building a list is meant to be fun: you pick your candidates and drag them into order, and your list is saved with the ranking. Each topic has room for a sensible number of entries – around ten for a month, twenty for a year or an artist, fifty for a whole decade. If you have already rated the releases, your ratings can pre-sort the list for you, so the two systems play together rather than compete.

Everyone's lists are then combined into an overall chart: the higher a release sits on your list, the more points it contributes, and the points from all lists add up to the community's standings. You can browse the combined chart, look at any member's individual list, and even wind the clock back to see how the race looked at an earlier date. Explore the current topics on the release rankings, track rankings and video rankings pages, or jump in from the Rankings menu in the navigation.

Numbers and tags only say so much – sometimes you want to put your opinion into words. For that there are two formats. A blurb is a short text, preferably a one-liner, that we display right next to the name in lists and on the item's own page. You can write a blurb about a release, a track, a video or an artist – a quick "why this is worth your time" in a sentence or two.

A review is the long form: a lengthy, free-form text about a release, with paragraphs to structure your thoughts. Every review gets a page of its own that you can share, and reviews are also shown on the release page and in various lists. If you write a review, a blurb makes a great summary to go with it – the blurb travels with the release through the lists, and the release page shows your review in its place. The timelines – on the front page, on artist, release and member pages – carry every published text among the rest of the activity, and each has a switch that narrows it down to just the blurbs and reviews.

Blurbs and reviews are public, and other members can react to them – a quick way to show appreciation without writing a reply. As with rating and tagging, you record your familiarity before writing about the music. And if you want to jot something down just for yourself, there are private notes on every release: they are never published and only you can see them.

At its core is the music database, which you can browse to discover music: more than 20,000 artists and 50,000 releases, many rated and tagged, most linking to services like Spotify and Bandcamp.

With a free account, you can rate, tag and review music and add missing artists and releases. Through your tags, you and the other users determine each release's genre and "progressiveness".

Anyone who listens to a lot of music knows how hard it is to keep track. We provide a workflow for exactly that.

Joining is free. There is no separate registration form and no password to choose: the first time you sign in with your email address (see the next section), your account is created automatically. We simply ask you to choose a user name and accept our privacy policy and terms. We never share your email address with third parties.

Signing in is passwordless. Enter your email address (or user name) and we'll email you a six-digit code. Enter it on the website, or click the link in the email, and you're in. Each code is valid for 15 minutes and works once. If we don't recognise your email, we create your account on the spot.

Once you're in, your browser keeps you signed in, so there's no need to log in again on every visit. Your session refreshes itself in the background as you use the site and survives reloads and reopened tabs. If you don't return within 30 days it expires, and you simply request a fresh code. Multiple open tabs all share the same session.

For your security, the session is stored in your browser in a way that page scripts cannot read, so it can't be lifted by malicious code. When you log out, your session ends immediately – on every tab and device – rather than lingering in the background.

As a rule, anything released as an album (CD, vinyl, digital, etc.) or music video (VHS, DVD, Blu-ray) can be added. Classical music is currently an exception, because the database does not yet support composer information. For now the focus is on any style of music except classical, though that may change in the future.