About This Website

This website is a collaborative music database, focusing primarily - but not exclusively - on progressive music. We are completely non-commercial, there are no membership subscription fees and no ads. Anyone can create an account and add to the database, which of course means adding artists, releases and tracks, but also to rate, tag and comment on the music.

What can I do here?

The most basic service we provide is the music database, which you can browse to find new music to listen to. It contains more than 20,000 artists and 50,000 releases. Many of the releases are rated and tagged, and most are linked to services that allow you to listen to the music, such as Spotify and Bandcamp.

If you decide to create a (free) account, you can rate, tag and review the music yourself. You can add missing artists and releases. Through the tags you assign you, together with all the other users, determine the genre and "progressiveness" status of the music.

One big problem of people who listen to a lot of music is that it becomes difficult to keep track of what you listened to. We have a workflow in place which helps with that.

How Do I Join?

Of course participation is 100% free. You simply fill out the registration form - all that's required is for you to pick an unique user name and enter a valid email address. We require email activation to prevent abuse, and to make sure that when you forget your password you can recover the account. Of course we will not share your email address with any third parties.

Rating System

Users rate releases on a scale from 0 to 100, displayed as a numerical rating from 0 to 10 (with fractions). For aggregate values we also show the number of "votes" as superscript.
We then divide the ratings into the following "tiers" (ranges of rating values):
TierNameLowMidHighDescription
FBad0.0-0.91.0-1.92.0-2.9This should rarely be assigned, most releases have at least some redeeming qualities.
EMediocre3.0-3.63.7-4.24.3-4.9Bad, but there is far worse music.
DDecent5.0-5.25.3-5.65.7-5.9This is music you would not want to listen to if given a choice, but you cannot really call it bad either, and the musicians involved are actually trying to make this sound good.
CGood6.0-6.26.3-6.66.7-6.9Good, but not great. This music probably will not make it onto your daily playlist too often, but you would not mind listening to it occasionally
BGreat7.0-7.27.3-7.67.7-7.9This is playlist material. You really enjoy listening to this, but you are not doing so regularly because there is other music which is still better.
AAwesome8.0-8.28.3-8.68.7-8.9This is where the bulk of your favorite music hangs out. It is what you listen to the most - there are better releases still, but these are masterpieces and these are not that numerous. And there is a lot more music on the lower tiers, but you do not listen to that a lot.
SSupreme9.0-9.49.5-9.89.9-10The best of the best. If you know a lot of releases then you could have dozens of releases in the masterpiece tier, but most people only have a few. These should be releases that you consider to be (almost) flawless exemplars of their genres/styles and which in your opinion everyone should know and at least respect as landmark releases.
Each rating is displayed as a horizontal bar which consists of the 7 tiers, with the rating value and/or tier letter displayed in the corresponding tier along with vertical bars indicating the sub-tier (how low or high the rating is within the tier). The table below shows all rating values at a (sub-)tier boundary and the resulting rating bar:
ValueBarTier
0.0FBad
1.0FBad
2.0FBad
3.0EMediocre
3.7EMediocre
4.3EMediocre
5.0DDecent
5.3DDecent
5.7DDecent
6.0CGood
6.3CGood
6.7CGood
7.0BGreat
7.3BGreat
7.7BGreat
8.0AAwesome
8.3AAwesome
8.7AAwesome
9.0SSupreme
9.5SSupreme
9.9SSupreme

How Are Ratings Aggregated?

There are many possible ways to calculate an aggregate rating from a list of individual ratings, which is what we obviously need to do for tracks and releases. The simplest is to compute an average value. But we think that this does not lead to the best results. Instead we compute the median value, or in other words, the typical value that is assigned by most users.

There are two additional things we do. First, there is the trust rank. Each user has a trust rank value, ranging from 1 to 10. New users start with 4, and more seasoned users - either by request or when they get recognized by admins - get trust ranks of 6 or 8. This trust rank is used as a weight in all computations. We also have machine accounts which collect data from other websites - those all have a trust rank of 1, because we regard those merely as a means to get more data into the system. To get back to the topic of rating aggregation, when we compute the median value the trust rank is always taken into account.

The other thing we do when calculating the mean is that we use a layered approach. We first divide all the tiers into three groups (low, mid and high) and see where most (weighted) rating values are. Within this group we then do the same for the tiers - we select the tier with the most "votes". Then within this tier, we select the correct sub-tier using the same mechanism. Finally, within the selected sub-tier we calculate the weighted median value, which we then choose as the aggregated value.

How Are Items Ranked?

When you browse the releases ordered by overall rank, the system needs to sort the releases in a way which takes into account the aggregated rating as well as the number of ratings. The simplest way to do that would be to sort by the product of these values. In practice we found that this boosts releases with a lot of ratings too much, so we chose to use a logarithmic value of the number of ratings instead, lessening the boosting effect somewhat.

So do not be surprised when in the list of ranked releases (or tracks) the aggregate rating of the releases appears to be unsorted, since items with lower aggregate ratings can outrank more highly rated items if the number of ratings is substantially higher.

Can I Add Anything I Like?

The basic rule is: Anything which was released as an album (CD/Vinyl/MP3/etc) or music video (VHS/DVD/Blu-Ray) can be added. Classical music is a bit of a problem because in the structure of the database you can't yet enter composer information. So right now the focus is on any style of music except classical, but we might change that in the future.

What is the Difference Between Progressive and Prog by Style?

In the past we were using just one tag called "Progressive". At some point we decided that a bit more flexibility is needed. We split it into two tags: "Progressive", which reflects the true "progressiveness" of the music, and "Prog by Style", which is more about style/genre. We are currently experimenting with how to visualize this distinction. In most tag badges it will not be visible at all, there we just say "Prog" to mean that something is either Progressive or Prog by Style. There simply isn't enough room to show the distinction without it getting too complicated.

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Get In Touch
Please use the feedback form or drop us an email at info@awesomeprog.com if you want to get in touch with us. In particular, please let us know if you have a feature request or you noticed a bug or some other problem which keeps you from using our website.
Are You a Band or Artist?
If you are interested in getting your releases onto this website, you should simply add and tag them yourself. You can also send us music (use the feedback form), but we cannot promise a review since most of the time we have for this website goes into maintenance and technical improvements. Having said that, We are always interested in discovering new music, and we will consider giving your music a listen, if time allows.