I tried ranking my albums out of five stars - I think I've gotten it wrong. Thoughts?

FarraigePlaisteach
2026-03-16T23:11:44Z

TLDR/Warning: this might be a tedious read. But I'm curious if I could have gone about rating my albums better.

I tend to simply either favourite an album or not. The idea of giving albums and tracks marks out of five stars seems tedious, difficult to match to how I feel and just doesn't match how my head works. But my collection has grown over the decades and I've been bed bound a lot lately, so I'm trying to organise/categorise based on my feelings towards the albums rather than genre. I'm also hoping to rejuvenate my old interest in music (playing in a band and recording for a living took the shine off of casual listening for me). I thought it would be an interesting experiment to try out, so I rated songs from over 50 albums.

I came up with a rigid and hopefully balanced definition for each rating:

1 star - Dislike. I hope I never hear this song again (but I'll keep it purely because it's part of the album)

2 stars - Neutral. It doesn't annoy me, but it's too generic to be interesting

3 stars - Sometimes this song hits the spot.

4 stars - This song usually hits the spot.

5 stars - This song always hits the spot.

Then I rate the album out of five stars based on the average of the song ratings. The result is that no albums got 5 stars, a seven got 4 stars, the vast majority of albums are rated at 3 or 2 stars. Even among the 3-star albums, some I like much more than others depending on whether they contain mostly consistent 3-star songs or half 4-star songs and half 2-star songs.

I wonder if the lack of 5-star albums is because of the definitions I gave each of the 1-5-star possibilities. For example, I don't know if any song "always hits the spot". Or maybe it's just that I'm not as into my music as I used to be.

Anyway, I thought maybe people interested in music and data might have thoughts on going about this differently. It's worth asking before I do the next 1,000 albums :) Maybe you'd define each of the 5 stars differently. Any takers?

Edit: thanks to everyone for reading all this and commenting their thoughts. I have a system I'm happy with now, but always happy to continue to chat with fellow (and reluctant) pedants about this.

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