HOW RATINGS WORK:

As you the reader may or may not be aware, there are two main schools of thought (among the amateur web-reviewing community) on how to assign a numerical 'rating' to a particular album. The first, the Prindle method, is to assign it a rating of 1-10, with only a maximum of one album per group receiving the 10. The advantage of this is that it allows the reviewer to make clear which individual album he/she considers to be that artist's peak. The disadvantage, however, is that not all 10's (and, likewise, not all 9's) are created equal. For instance on his site, Weird Al Yankovic gets a 10, whereas, say, Abbey Road or Dark Side of the Moon only get 9's because he considers The Beatles and The Wall to be the best albums of The Beatles and Pink Floyd, respectively, but I somehow seriously doubt that he is trying to convince us that WAY is better than DSOTM.

George Starostin came up with a solid alternative to this - in his system, albums are rated on a scale from 1-15, and he leaves open the possibility for a group to have more than one 'perfect' album. Also, his band ratings, while often a source of great debate among purusers of his page, allow him to compensate for the fact that, as mentioned previously, the best album of one group need not be on the same level as the best album of another group (ie Tarkus is rated lower overall than Blonde on Blonde, although he considers these to be the best works of ELP and Dylan respectively).

But this retains one slight disadvantage - while George usually does make a strong effort to avoid giving a band more than one 'perfect score' for its particular band rating, from time to time this relieves him of the duty of actually making clear, in his ratings, which album is actually his favorite. Ultimately, would he choose Leeds or Wight as the best Who album? While the actual reviews are usually able to sort themselves out, oftentimes the line becomes a bit muddled - as another example, it is somewhat hard to tell if Magical Mystery Tour or Abbey Road is George's favorite.

Ideally, I would like to have a system that can somehow incorporate both the Prindle model and the Starostin model. Originally, I implemented a setup incorporating both ratings, as described below. The basic premise remains the same - the Prindle ie 1-10 rating is given first, followed in parentheses by the overall, 1-15 rating. However, over time I've realized that even with this setup, I was unable to achieve a desired level of precision in my ratings. Originally, the setup was such that, while the overall ratings of 12 and above could take on 1-10 values of either 9 or 10, the rest of the overall ratings were in a 1-1 correspondence with values on the 1-15 scale. But I learned that this was not sufficient, mainly because the Prindle ratings of 7 and 8 seem to cover such unbelievably wide ground as to make limiting them to only one value on the 1-15 scale somewhat counterproductive

As a result, as of 10-26-01, a modification is being made, as explained again below - in addition to the normal rating procedure of adding 3 to the Prindle rating to get the overall rating, and then giving all albums that receive a Prindle 9 an overall rating of 12 or above (with the Prindle 10 going to the album of the artist that receives the highest such mark), I am also adding ratings of 7(11) and 8(12). This will serve to expand the quality range that Prindle 7's and 8's cover.

In summary, this is a "conversion chart" for the various ratings. Please read carefully - it's really NOT that difficult to understand.

PS: you may notice that the ratings are slightly top-heavy. This is not because I am necessarily inclined to like all music that I come in contact with, but rather because, at this point, I can only afford complete discographies of bands that I like, and as such the number of 15's, 14's etc. should be taken with that in mind.

Total records reviewed: 652

Album rating distribution statistics:

Mean: 10.6503

Standard Deviation: 2.1658

Skewness: -0.5269

Kurtosis: 3.2707

Standard Error: 0.0848

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