I’ve gotten a question about my rating system. If one person is actually asking, I have to assume there are other people that don’t get it, but aren’t asking. Here’s my best attempt at an explanation.
As I listen to each track, I’m giving it one of three possible ratings: 👎🏻, 👍🏻, 🤷♂️. (That’s thumbs-down, thumbs-up, and shrug, respectively, in case your browser doesn’t support emoji or is somehow rendering it strangely).
Thumbs-up and -down are probably fairly self explanatory. The shrug is somewhere in the middle.
While I’m listening, my criteria is really something like this:
👎🏻 (thumbs-down): If I were listening to Pandora or the radio or something, and this song came on, I would most likely skip to the next song.
👍🏻 (thumbs-up): If this song came on, I’d probably turn it up and might even sing along if the mood caught me just right. If I didn’t recognize it, I’d fire up Sound Hound or Shazam.
🤷♂️ (shrug): If this song came on, I wouldn’t skip to the next track, but I wouldn’t do anything else either. I’d just let it roll and listen to it.
Finally, I’ve given the album as a whole a star rating. This is mostly a summation of the individual ratings of the tracks but I reserve the right to bump up or down a star, depending. For example if the good songs are pretty good, but the bad songs are really bad, there may be fewer stars on an album with a reasonable number of 👍🏻s.
Liner Notes Blog 