I have started working on an Excel sheet where you can add ratings for each album at AM and get recommendations for what to listen to next among the albums you haven't rated. The recommendations would be based on the albums' appearances in critics lists.

If there is a strong positive agreement between your ratings and a critic list (among the albums you have rated), the remaining albums on that critic list will get a high predicted rating and thus recommended to you.

Similarly, if there is a weak agreement or even negative agreement between your ratings and a critic list (among the albums you have rated), the remaining albums on that critic list will get a low predicted rating and thus not recommended to you.

The final predicted rating for each album you haven't rated will be based on all critics lists (or rather as many as I can get into an Excel spreadsheet).

Is anyone interested in such a thing?

I am interested. Great idea Henrik !

Sounds great, Henrik. How the deuce do you find time fr stuff like that?

This sounds amazing!

That's a cool idea.

It's going to be really great.

Sounds wonderful, Henrik.

I'll join this cool idea too, Henrik.

At the rateyourmusic site, you can make use of a similar 'feature', you either recommend albums directly to other users or get albums recommended from them, or you get a list of recommended albums in an automated sense by pressing some button. This will probably work based on your personal ratings as well.

Have to admit, that I hardly ever made use of that feature there. Seems like a lot of administration work for you, or not?

Stats, music, spreadsheets. How could I not be in?

(I have to type NGGA to post this!)

Excellent idea. You need any help Henrik?

This procedure with predicted ratings sounds interesting. It sounds pretty fascinating to get an album recommended with a statement like: 'You are gonna like this album and give it 3.74 stars'. Cool!

Great to see so much interest!

I'll probably make a beta version available in the forum soon. It would be great to hear if it works well for you and if you have any further suggestions before I add all the critics lists.

You can now find a test version here.

Before clicking the link, please note that the document is 43 MB large...

Thank you, Henrik. Just downloaded it and had a first dummy test run. Looking pretty good, seems to work fine.

One verification: I understand that the standard deviation has to first kick in (i.e. >0) to get any recommendations. Right?

One question: On what scale is the rating supposed to be, 0 to 5, 1 to 10, or doesn't that matter?

And one minor suggestion: I would prefer to have the artist names sorted such, that a) in case of bands with prefix "The" this prefix is not considered and b) in case of solo artists the last name goed for the first name.

That's it for now, will take a closer look in the coming days.

That is one huge file!

Took it for a test run as well. Looks amazing. I entered only 10-15 ratings (1-10 scale worked for me) and it recommend a lot of my favorite albums. I'm gonna enter some more ratings.

Great stuff! put it about 40 albums from A to B and the recommendation section gave me 16 albums from the top 40 I'd have in my top 100 or so!

Thumbs up!

I'm using a 1-10 rating scale, and some recommendations claim I would give albums a 10,5. Same goes for when I use 1-5, "Bridge Over Troubled Water"'s expected rating is 5.1

Cells E4983 to E4990 you calculate an average rating. The first rating, i.e. E3, is not included. A minor bug?

Stephan, it's kind of funny to see higher ratings than your scale. It's even possible to get negative predicted ratings, those are albums to really stay away from

Thanks for all these quick comments!

I will change the artist name format, and I will probably set the predicted rating to a max of 10 and min of 0 to make it less confusing/annoying. And yes, you can choose your own scale.

Cells E4983 to E4990 you calculate an average rating. The first rating, i.e. E3, is not included. A minor bug?
Wow Andre, you have sharp eyes. However, I'm not using those averages anymore, so they should be removed.

This sounds amazing! Can't wait to give it a spin!

Wow, looks like that was a lot of work.

Well, I tried it, probably rated about 75 albums or so, and the highest 3 recommendations that I don't already own are Suicide's s/t, 'Trout Mask Replica,' and De La Soul's '3 Feet High and Rising.' Worth getting?

3 Feet High is pretty good.

I'm re-downloading this because I had my macros settings on high and I clicked on the link rather than saving it and I think something screwed up.

How many albums did you guys rate before you started to see normal results? Should I only rate albums I really like? The top of my list is Death Cab for Cutie and a bunch of jazz. For a while Pet Sounds was the bottom of my list. Is this because I'm voting 1 for all of Tom Waits albums or because I'm voting 4-5 for a lot of other 60's-70's albums I think are overrated. Because, now I'm giving 10's to the great 60's and 70's albums and I'm not seeing much of a change. I suppose it's the Tom Waits thing, once I trash those records my coorelation goes down with almost every critics lists.

This is amazing Henrik. I really hope I can get it to work for me.

John, I hope you'll get more luck with the recommendations as you add more ratings. You should definitely add poor ratings as well, as that's the way to distinguish between what you like and don't like. But, coming to think of it, you're not a little too negative on Tom Waits?

Hopefully it will work even better in the future, when I've added more lists.

To everyone: If you want to help me with additional explanatory columns (male/female, solo/group, genres,...) that would be extremely welcome.

It's a little better now. My weird taste in jazz really skews things I think along with a lot of acclaimed albums from the 60's and 70's that I really don't like at all. I'm not being harsh with the Tom Waits, I really can't stand his music other than his early 70's stuff. The albums at the top of my list right now are albums that I've heard a little bit of because they were recommended but really didn't like. But, at least they were ones that were recommended to me before.

Hopefully when you add those other categories it will change things for me. This is a really great project and I appreciate it a lot!

I really like this idea. After having put in my RYM-ratings for a fair amount of albums on a day home with a cold, it seems to work fairly alright.

I guess the key issue is how many critics lists that can reasonably be added to the Excel sheet. The more, the better precision obviously, but maybe also the more demanding technically.

It seems like lists of separate genres should be particularly interesting to add. And maybe lists of the best music from particular decades. The normally more interesting "best 100 albums ever"-lists are probably less useful here.

Anyway, great feature!

dR

Robban, good comments! I'm exactly thinking along those lines.

Well Henrik, you're my most compatible user on RYM so we're supposed to think alike!

"To everyone: If you want to help me with additional explanatory columns (male/female, solo/group, genres,...) that would be extremely welcome."

Henrik,
I'm working on an excel-list including all the albums in the acclaimed-3000 list (and also the bubbling-under albums) and I'm adding collums whith 'genre' en 'styles' according to the allmusic.com website. At this time I'm halfway the list and I hope I can complete the list whithin a couple of weeks. If you are interrested I would like to send you the list when it is finished

marc, that's fantastic news. OF COURSE I'm interested!

Thanks!

Henrik,

Finally i've finished the list. But I'm looking for a way to send it to you.

Wow! Please send your list to henrik.franzon (at) gmail.com

Many thanks in advance!

Netflix has a similar feature with movies. Although, I'm not sure if you have to be a member or not.