I have been wanting to back rate hundreds of albums throughout the years but without going back and listen to them again to see where they stand. My rating system is based solely off of album plays that I have been tracking as well as possible for almost 10 years using last.fm. Since I got an account in 2006 I have been keeping track of all listening habits no matter what device I have been using. Since there are invariable tracks that get more play, I just use the amount played of the last few tracks to figure the total play count since the least favorite tracks were likely played in album order instead of just shuffle for the most part.

I have decided that 25 listens for me is the top tier and deserving of 5 stars. Any album that I took up approximately a day of my life to listen to should be considered a favorite album and deserving of the 5 stars. then the rankings go down every 5 listens until 1-5 is represented by 2.5 stars. I am not that interested in rating albums that I hated or barely listened to so most albums will be rated 2.5 and up and few really bad ones are 2.0 and below.

In some ways this rating system skews scores towards poppy or easily listenable material, but there is plenty of challenging material that has dominated my listening habits as well so it is a good representation.