Marcus Cavanaugh

Five-Star Ratings Considered Harmful

Five-star rating systems will chip away at your time, your songs, and your patience. My iTunes ratings had lost their meaning, but I’m fighting back.

Five-star ratings express excellence; One-star ratings imply crappiness. At least that’s how I treated ratings until recently. But in the case of digital music and photo libraries, that mindset will warp and twist your rating system until it becomes meaningless.

Ideally, you would rate your absolute favorite songs with five stars, and your least favorite songs with one star; the rest would fall somewhere in between. When you’re all done, you will be able to select your favorite songs instantly through filtering, and you’ll know which songs you don’t like. In theory, that rating system should be perfectly sufficient.

But it doesn’t account for two variables: time and taste. As time passes, our preferences change and grow. We find more songs to rate, and as we hear different songs we find new favorites. What I consider five-star quality today will probably be considered 3-star in a few months.

Worse yet, by rating my “favorites,” I tend to listen to the four-to-five-star rated songs the most — the more I listen to a song, the less I like it. Diminishing returns.

The songs I haven’t rated so highly are filled with cobwebs, because I never bother to play them. I know I’ll like the songs I’ve rated highly (until I get sick of them), so I never used to bother with the rest. But that just wears out the songs I actually like.

So I came up with a better solution.

When I hear a song, I typically either really like it, I think it’s just okay, or I absolutely hate it. But if I hate it, why would I even want to listen to it any more? (Answer: I don’t.)

That leaves two kinds of songs: Songs I don’t mind listening to, and songs I really enjoy.

Today I shoved all my ratings down. I converted five-star ratings into two-star ratings and four-star ratings into one-star ratings. The rest became unrated.

Here’s how I handle ratings now:

1. If I hear a song I especially like, I’ll give it a star.
2. If I absolutely love it, I might give it two stars. Might.
3. If I don’t want to hear it again, I uncheck it.
4. Everything else is left unrated.

As I play through my library, I’ll adjust ratings as above when I encounter certain songs. It’s simple because I always know what to rate a song, and it’s easy because I don’t feel obligated to rate every single song in my library. Less time wasted, more time to enjoy music.

I applied the same principle to my Aperture photos. Take the plunge and dump meaningless ratings before your favorite songs become overplayed noise. You’ll be glad you did.

Posted 13 July 2008 in Music, Tech

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