Methodology
.wavShort version: real people rate albums 0 to 100. We average what they say. We don’t show that average as gospel until enough people have weighed in. No algorithm decides what a record is worth — the listeners do.
01 · Scale
Every rating on Goat Music is a whole number from 0 to 100. Not five stars, not a heart, not a percentage rounded off a critic’s letter grade. A hundred-point scale gives you room to say a record is a 71 and mean it — not a begrudging four stars because there was no room for a 3.8.
02 · The Goat score
The Goat score you see on an album page is the plain average of every listener rating on that record. There’s no weighting formula, no engagement boost, no hidden model deciding a record deserves more than what people actually gave it. If the average moves, it’s because a person moved it.
03 · The minimum
Three ratings isn’t a score, it’s a rumor with a number attached. An album needs to clear a minimum number of ratings before we’ll show its Goat score as authoritative. Below that bar, you still see the ratings and the count — you just don’t see us pretend three opinions are a consensus.
04 · The people
Every rating traces back to a real profile you can open and follow. It’s not a review farm and it’s not a critic score scraped from somewhere else — it’s someone whose taste you can check against your own, and decide if you trust their ear.
A 0–100 human rating scale, no decimals. You pick a whole number that reflects how the record actually hit you — not a 5-star compromise, not a thumbs up or down.
No. The Goat score on an album page is a plain average of real listeners’ ratings — the people who rated it, nothing more. There’s no weighting model, no engagement signal, no hidden formula deciding what a record “deserves.”
A score from three people isn’t a score, it’s a rumor. We hold back the Goat score as “authoritative” until an album clears a minimum number of ratings — before that, you’ll see the individual ratings and the count, not a headline number pretending to mean more than it does.
People, with names and profiles you can click into and follow. Every rating on Goat Music traces back to a real account — not an anonymous review farm, not a bot, not a critic score scraped from somewhere else.
Yes. Open any album and you can see the ratings and the people behind them. If someone’s taste lines up with yours, follow them — that’s the whole point of a rating system with faces attached to it.
No. There’s no pay-to-rank, no sponsored score, no way for a label or artist to move a Goat score. The number is the average of the ratings, full stop.
Curious who’s behind Goat Music and why it works this way? Read the story on the about page.
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