Free · rate, review, keep the log
An Album of the Year alternative that logs what you play
Riffiter is a music rating and logging site: Letterboxd, for records. Rate albums and tracks from half a star to five, write reviews, build lists, and log the shows you went to. Connect Last.fm and the diary underneath fills itself, so a year from now the site can tell you what you actually played and not only what you remembered to score.
How to start
Create a free account
Email or Spotify, a few seconds either way. No card, and no paywall in front of your own numbers.
Rate three albums you know by heart
Onboarding deals you a deck of covers. Half a star to five, in half-star steps. Three is enough for the site to start reading you.
Point Last.fm at it and stop typing
Connect Last.fm in Settings and everything you play from then on lands in your diary by itself. If what you have is a Spotify data export instead, upload the ZIP and it reads back every play in the file.
Bring over whatever will actually export
AOTY scores stay where they are, since there's no export button to press. Ratings you keep on RateYourMusic or Discogs do move: both hand you a CSV, and Settings → Connections copies it across.
A score says what you thought. A log says what you did.
Scoring records is a habit you already have, and Riffiter takes it as read. What it adds is everything around the number. Connect Last.fm and the plays arrive on their own, so the album you had on eleven times in March is on your profile whether or not you ever got round to rating it. Ratings and listens sit on the same page, and the gap between them is usually the interesting part.
The rest of the site treats music as something that happens in your life rather than in a table. Log the gigs you were at and they become an attendance record with a review wall on every show. Soundtrack credits link records to the films and series they turned up in. There are two daily music games for the days you want something lighter. Any artist can have a community board, opened by a listener who has actually rated the catalog, and your critic level climbs as your scores prove themselves against everyone else's.
Because every number here comes from listeners, the charts go places a critic aggregate can't follow, like the albums Riffiter listeners disagree on most or the well-rated records almost nobody has heard. And your profile is a real page with a URL, so the work you put in is yours to link to.
FAQ
- Can I import my Album of the Year ratings?
- No, and nobody can. Album of the Year has no export feature and no public API, which is why people keep asking for one on its own forums. Scraping your own profile is the only route anyone has found, and Riffiter doesn't do that. What does move is RateYourMusic and Discogs, which both export a CSV you can upload in Settings, and Last.fm, which connects in a click and brings your listening history with it.
- What is Riffiter, exactly?
- A music rating and logging site. Think Letterboxd, for records. You rate albums and tracks from half a star to five, write reviews, build lists, log the concerts you went to, and follow people whose taste you trust. Underneath all of that sits a diary of what you actually played, filled in from Last.fm or a Spotify export rather than by hand.
- How is it different from a score aggregator?
- Album of the Year puts critic and user scores side by side on a 0 to 100 scale and does it well. Riffiter points the other way, at your own listening over time. It logs every play, weighs each rating you leave against the community's on the same album, and keeps the whole record on a public page you can link to.
- Are there critic scores here?
- No. Every number on Riffiter comes from listeners, so albums the press ignored aren't punished for it. If a critic aggregate is the thing you came for, keep the tab you already have open.
- What's the rating scale?
- Half a star to five, in half-star steps, which is ten possible scores per album. Coming from 0 to 100 that feels blunt for about a week and then it stops mattering, because you spend the attention on the review instead of on whether a record is an 84 or an 86.
- Is Riffiter free?
- Yes. Rating, reviewing, lists, concert logging, importing your history and every stat page about your own listening are free. There's no paywall on your own data.
- Is this affiliated with Album of the Year?
- No. Riffiter is an independent music rating and review site with no connection to albumoftheyear.org.
Album of the Year is a trademark of its owner. Riffiter is an independent site and is not affiliated with albumoftheyear.org.