![[OC] Average RateYourMusic Album Rating for Superstar Musicians at Each Age](https://www.byteseu.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/zljcr2zsb7uf1-1024x674.png "[OC] Average RateYourMusic Album Rating for Superstar Musicians at Each Age")
Source: RateYourMusic, RIAA, Rolling Stone
Tools: Gemini, Excel, Datawrapper
I wanted to track album quality for superstar artists by their age. I first defined a "sueprstar" as either having sold at least 50 million units in the US according to the RIAA or being included in Rolling Stone's list of the 100 greatest artists. I then looked up the ratings for every album in each of those artist's discographies on RateYourMusic. That part was a nightmare. RYM doesn't have an API, so I had to screenshot a ton of pages and feed those into Gemini to extract the data. I did a longer write-up here.
Posted by noisymortimer
2 Comments
Viz captures that late-career dip beautifully—Kanye’s arc mirroring the hype crash post-Yeezus hits home. Scraping RYM’s a grind, but the age-rating curve’s worth it; my playlist experiments with older albums always skew nostalgic, explaining the bump.
The spikey data at older ages makes me feel that there’s not enough sample data up high