3

Possible Reratings Mistake

A couple of weeks ago I noticed an unusual series of ratings while using the Advanced Search Engine. When searching only for five-star albums there were several albums listed that didn't have the visual star-rating to match. To see what I mean, see that attached image.

At first, I thought the updaters were just busy and would correct them within a few days, whether the values were wrong or the star-rating images attached. But a couple a weeks later and still no changes...

From my understanding, when an album is rated or rerated at AllMusic not only is a new rating value entered on your system but it also has to seperately have a star-rating image attached that matches the rating it has been awarded. These two things aren't often done at the same time, with the image usually being attached to the review first and the actual system value being added a few days/weeks later. This is why when a specific star-rating is selected on the the search engine that newly rated albums usually don't get listed amongst the results. Or if the album has been rerated, it carries its old rating in the advanced search engine for a while.

If correct, is it possible that the AllMusic team intended to update the rating values for a selection of old albums a few weeks ago but forgot to change the star-rating images to match the new values?

One album has been fully changed so far - Aaliyah's self titled album has already had its star-rating image updated to match the new value. If it's helpful, I can list of the other album entries affected.

Follow

4 replies

Votes Newest Oldest

Great to see it fixed. What prompted the correction - was it an enquiry from yourself or did someone else spot the errors?

After AllMusic updated all those ratings for last year's 'Decade in Review' article, I wondered if they were going to also update their ratings for albums released in the 2000s. They have fewer five-star ratings for popular music albums from the 2000s than they do for the 2010s. Even with this new update there's only around 100 albums from the 2000s, compared to about 130 for the 2010s. And that's before we take into account that 2018 and 2019 are deemed too recent to have albums from those years updated to a full five-star rating yet.

Hopefully this new update is just the start and there are more planned for the near future.

Comment

The database has hundreds of millions of links and connections, so we can't do a full update of the data set every day (it would just take too long), so we we rely on a Date Change field in the database to alert us that the individual record needs to be updated. It appears as though when these bulk updates happened, we never got the alert to make the changes to each affected record.

I was exactly wrong. The album ratings for the ones we were looking at had been bumped up in the core data but the site was not updating properly.

So the Advanced Search call was coming back with the right albums, but the rating stars had not been updated.

If you check your same parameters on Advanced Search you''ll see the proper ratings.
https://www.allmusic.com/advanced-search

Thanks for the heads-up.

Comment

Interesting error. Some leftfield preferences aside ('The Letting Go' over 'I See a Darkness' or 'Under Construction' over 'Miss E... So Addictive') the albums affected by it wouldn't be unusual choices for a publication to name on a list of the best popular music of that era...

:p

Comment

Yep. This is an error.

The data set that powers advanced search is a snapshot of data that is updated from time to time and it looks like it is out of sync.

Comment

Zac, Millie Jackson's album should be re-rated, because there's a large difference of 3 stars between your editor and users.  Its blurb didn't explain why the editor rated it only a star.

Reply