A Rate Your Music alternative for your own listening life
Raygum is a free Rate Your Music alternative for listeners who want ratings, notes, lists and catalogue depth — with their own listening diary, rather than a global chart, at the centre.
Free · Open catalogue · Web and Android
Catalogue brain, meet diary brain
The chart remembers where it ranked.
Your note remembers why side two finally won you over.
No great album-site feud required
Rate Your Music has spent decades building a formidable community catalogue: ratings, reviews, lists, charts and a detailed language of genres and descriptors. If you enjoy finding the highest-rated ambient record from a very particular year, it is unusually good company.
Raygum is not trying to out-chart that. It starts with your relationship to a release: what you rated it, what you noticed, what you want to hear next and which credits or musical connections made you curious. Its catalogue foundation is open, and the result is closer to a living notebook than a public league table.
Keep Rate Your Music if
Try Raygum if
Feature by feature
Rate Your Music is broader and deeper when the question is “what does the community rate highest?” Raygum is more deliberate when the question is “what did this record mean to me, and where did it lead?”
What Raygum makes room for
There is still plenty to explore, but the product keeps returning to a simple question: what would be useful to remember the next time this record finds you?
Five stars is tidy. “The bassline made a wet Tuesday feel cinematic” is information your future self can actually use.
Explore who made a record, the equipment connected to the sound, its samples and the sources that explain how it came together.
Put recommendations on a Listen List and return when the mood is right. There is no prize for turning leisure into backlog management.
Raygum points to supported services including Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer and YouTube, rather than asking to become your music player.
A catalogue habit that stays personal
Find the release without first deciding where it belongs in the all-time canon.
Add one to five stars and a note that explains your particular response.
A collection, a producer credit or a saved recommendation can lead you back later.
Compare your options
Questions, answered plainly
Not for every job. Rate Your Music is especially strong for community charts, detailed genre classification and a large user-built catalogue. Raygum is an alternative for listeners who want their own ratings, notes, lists and musical rabbit holes to be the centre of the experience.
Use Rate Your Music if global rankings, community consensus and highly detailed genre exploration are your priorities. Try Raygum if you want a personal music diary with credits, equipment, samples, sources and stories connected to the records you log.
Raygum has discovery and trending surfaces, but it is not a substitute for Rate Your Music’s extensive community charts. Raygum puts more emphasis on your own diary, Listen List, collections and the context behind a release.
Raygum uses the open MusicBrainz catalogue, with millions of artists and releases. You can rate releases, follow artists and explore connected catalogue information.
Yes. Creating an account and using Raygum is free.
Raygum works on the web and has a native Android app. A public native iPhone app is not available yet.
Comparison reviewed 28 August 2026 using Rate Your Music’s public website. Product names belong to their owners; Raygum is not affiliated with Rate Your Music.
Start with one rating and one sentence. The catalogue can stay enormous; your diary only needs to be yours.
Free · Web and Android · Your streaming service can stay exactly where it is