There’s really no solid equivalent to Goodreads or Letterboxd for music lovers, but Record Club is aiming to change that. Yes, we have Rate Your Music, but its interface is crowded, and it seems geared more toward long-form reviews than cataloging your listening habits and connecting with other fans. Record Club is clean and modern, with a streamlined interface that’s similar to Letterboxd.
All the basic features you would expect from such a site are present here. You can rate and review records or mark them as listened to. You can also see what your friends are listening to and what albums are trending among other users. There’s a space on your profile to list your five favorite albums, as well as your five records in heavy rotation. You can also create custom lists (ranked or unranked) and share them – useful for tracking your top albums of the year, or putting together a genre-specific crash course. You can also add records to your queue, so you can keep track of albums you want to listen to, but haven’t gotten to yet. (I will probably use it extensively.)
You can follow your favorite artists as well as entire record labels. This makes it easy to stay on top of new artists on labels like 4AD, AD 93, Fire Talk, and Warp. Record Club takes all its data from the open-source music encyclopedia MusicBrainz. If you sign up, follow me and see what I’m up to again this week.
<a href