This site....

[tbakeman]

Is so much better than Ratemymusic.com, and way more accurate. Just saying.

[Kiki]

Ratemymusic.com takes into account people's positive and negative reactions when making their charts. BEA only takes into account the positives I like the BEA way.

[Guest]

RYM's database is bigger, which is a plus obviously, even if it does lead to inaccurate information far more regularly than on BEA, and their overall year charts are more in tune with my tastes than BEA, but I've never even thought about registering there. The forum here has a real community vibe, full of lots of interesting personalities and a surprising lack of trolling, making it pretty unique among online music forums. BEA also has a cleaner, more streamlined look, and is very easy to navigate. I use both BEA and RYM for recommendations, but I'd never consider using RYM for in-depth discussion. The forums here are great, even if the quality of discussion does fluctuate from time to time, and that is what keeps me (and I imagine many other users) coming back to it.

[Guest]

Yeah what lethalnezzle said. It's the forums that make this site unique.

[Puncture Repair]

RYM is a bit /mu/ pitchforky - this site's rating aren't much better, but it's an improvement.

Plus BEA has an unparalleled community of brilliant and attractive human beings.

[Happymeal]

What I fucking hate about RYM is that everytime i go on there to finish my top 100 chart, it's so annoying to add new albums to your chart, so annoying to edit, and a very tedious process. BEA has the easier layout for me. Not only that, but finding artists are easier, but on RYM there are definitely a lot more gems higher up on the lists. For ex. Stormcock (album)

[useless]

[Kiki]

[useless]

[Saoirse]

Similiarly, I like going to Rate Your Music largely for the vast database, and it's great when you want to find a wide variety of works in a specific genre, musical movement or even certain type of mood or general music theme. However, going to the forums or doing anything that recieves member feedback is a masochists dream. It seems there's a professional trolling school somewhere on the site and a lot of frequent forum members were its star students.

So when it comes to personality and especially the community on the website, BEA is just leagues ahead, and even if the forum standards can slip from time to time, they are just so much friendlier and congenial than those on RYM, and it feels less like you're going to war with a bunch of crazed fanatics but rather engage in a thoughtful, positive debate, despite the occasional string of zombie threads along with the occasional contentious and beat-the-dead-horse arguments (which honestly one would find anywhere, the internet is not a perfect place after all ). And, yes, the structure of BEA is so much more neat and easy to use, while RYM is just sprawling and rather amorphous, making it tough to get around and discover different parts of the website.

So I think really both sites have their strengths and weaknesses and often it depends on what you're looking for when choosing which site to stream. Yes, often I like RYM overall charts (year or just general) a bit better and I especially like being able to look up singles and eps. And I often go there for specific genre reccomendations or if I want to find lesser-known or hard-to-find gems from a particular year or decade. However, I spend far more time on BEA, not only cause I like the especially personal user-to-user reccomendation of albums, but because it doesn't feel like the place in which you have to be constantly beligerant and on-your-toes, arguing with a lot of users (though Im definitely not singling out all of them) who just want to wreck havoc rather than a discussion.