AKMA opines on how he rates his iTunes tracks (following on the 5 ★ notion):
Here’s the way I assign stars to my iTunes:
0 stars: There’s a reason for keeping this around, but I don’t want to hear it
un-checked: This is either spoken word or temporarily off my listening list
1 star: This song is pretty unfortunate
2 stars: Baseline: good enough to enjoy, but not outstanding
3 stars: Noteworthy in some way; better than most of my baseline choices
4 stars: A favorite of mine, but my taste may be idiosyncratic here
5 stars: Everyone should like, and if you don’t, I’m comfortable thinking that it’s a peculiarity of your taste more than of mine
As I work through own criteria (and yes, I agree, a range of 5 stars is pretty coarse-grained), here’s what I come up with (oh, what an ineffective educator I could have made).
I start with a bare listenability of 3 stars: you start there and move up or down.
0: get rid of it. No reason to listen to it, so why keep it around, save for completeness?
So ★★★ means I don’t mind it coming up any time. Never grating, always welcome. 4 and 5 ✭ are easy enough: the kind of thing you seek out when you want to hear something good.
But what gets 1 or 2 stars? Generally, tracks that didn’t meet the standards of an artist’s usual work or the weaker tracks on a given release (are we done with albums as a form factor yet? We had the 40-45 minute package for the first 20 years of mass-appeal rock music, and the 60-70 minute CD for the last 20. Time to get back to singles or at most mini-releases of 2-5 consistently good tracks, instead of the same tracks with a bunch of others that bear nothing in common but the time of creation).
I think I like AKMA’s baseline of ✭✭ with ✭✭✭✭✭ reserved for those tracks everyone should like.
I do some fudging as well. I take classical stuff out of the mix, since I only load stuff I like or am trying to learn more about. Likewise jazz: don’t know enough to judge and it’s not a genre where you want to make snap judgments like stuff I mostly listen to. Spoken word likewise gets excluded.
I mostly use the ✭ system to load the iPod anyway, using the ratings to choose what gets loaded (mostly a mixture of stuff I have added lately or that I know I feel like having around).
Now playing: Never Saw Blue (Full Length Drums Mix) by Hayley Westenra from the album “Odyssey” | Get it (and I have no idea how I am going to rate this. These free tracks from iTunes are very spotty).