Zooming in on Crowdsourced Digital Curation
HexD. Rawphoric. Futuristic Swag. Colour bass. Heaven Trap. These are some of the weird and unusual genres recently uploaded to the Rateyourmusic.com catalog, a collaborative music database active since late 2000. Alongside Wikipedia and Discogs, it is among the few web 2.0 sites that have persisted into the COVID-19 epoch. With two or three new genres added to Rateyourmusic.com each week via a user-led voting system, the database has amassed over 3,000 categorizations for music recordings. I look into why people are doing this and what it means for the future of libraries and archives.
RYM Entry for Rawphoric.
In music delivery systems the curative element has perhaps been exaggerated for its capacity to develop musical communities. Spotify’s Loom and Pollen are a couple of the many vibe playlists that are “contextualize[d] around user communities,” according to one curator. In the same way a grocery store or coffee shop has site-specific audio prepared for their regimented customer base, streaming services can create communities which did previously exist in a fully-fleshed out forms. This has led to interesting approaches to music consumption insofar as fresh units of media ecologies have been produced via top-down interventions, seemingly out of thin air.
But another approach exists in the fertile ground of online music circles that allows for users to engage with the music they listen to in a more organic way, via the active creation of new genre tags. Behind Rateyourmusic’s clunky UI is an active community of music enthusiasts and creators participating in the collective curation of a vast catalog of music releases. While the bragging rights for website with largest catalog of commercial audio recordings belongs to Discogs, the ability to navigate and engage with music on RYM in a non-commercial way opens up possibilities of creative consumption patterns, which have a huge and direct influence on the rest of music distribution. RYM is effectively the sales-pitch arm of websites like Discogs, an online storefront for individuals and entities reselling their records, because by a voting system, genres can be added, deleted, or merged in the database.
RYM is valuable not because of its relatively normal charts page but instead due to its role in warehousing the knowledge of users who specialize in obscure regions of music. A cursory glance at RYM’s charts will reveal the prevailing music “taste” is roughly aligned with that of your average Fantano viewer or Pitchfork reader, with the addition of some metal and abstract/conscious hip hop fan communities. What powers Rateyourmusic is the highly collaborative design of the encyclopedia, which gives space for listeners of esoteric music to creatively engage with their interests and establish a platform for the underappreciated parts of the total organism of music.
It is therefore the opposite of how music trends have been observed by cultural observers and other crowdsourced databases (like Aestheticwiki), in which TikTok niches and other spontaneous aesthetico-musical happenings, key players, and top songs are presented, contextualized, and accounted for immediately after their initial explosion. They are, in effect, the death knell for a musical happening. Faced by an onslaught of ephemera (often non-material), RYM users do a tremendous amount of heavy lifting and deep listening for their database, devising for themselves a vital role in the musical listening landscape.
One particular user, Michael McKinney, first created his RYM account where he mostly categorizes and rates electronic music. The 27-year-old architect and music journalist, who has inputted nearly 14,000 artists and 13,500 releases into the website database, is also a moderator and donor.
As for where genres like mincecore, barber beats, livetronica, ambient americana, and rawphoric even come from, the answer depends on various different players in the cultural game — influencers, critics, creators, etc. — as well as a collective impulse to document and archive all manners of musical expression. Depending on the time and space of an entry’s recording, the origin of a genre entry could have taken place in a passing remark by a band member, which was the case of mincecore. Some of the genres already have an algorithmic Spotify mix available, indicating the influence of AI-generated tagging on organic cognitive categories. Others have the tried-and-tested origin of being coined in the liner notes of music releases, such as barber beats. Others are pre-existing signifiers that weren’t necessarily considered genres as such, but which have been added to the RYM database for ease of discovery, as is the case with Slacker Rock.
Foregrounded by a proliferation of soundcloud tags conceived by uploaders, Rateyourmusic has a legitimizing function for a genre. In a sense, against the especially black hole like conditions of internet content, RYM serves as a community library of largely ephemeral trends. Effectively a crowdsourced alternative to curation and soundcloud self-branding, Rateyourmusic or RYM or Sonemic fulfills a niche in music ecology, offering a moderated and democratized system for music discovery which sometimes extends into innovation. Posters and popstars coalesce in the final horizon of music consumption. Taken from the discursive trenches, noteworthy posters become influencers, DJs, and attain jobs in creative sectors. The site not only functions as a warehouse of knowledge but also extends into a real world influence which has been mostly unremarked upon.