On the Guardian website, you can now review or star rate more than 3 million albums ? or add any record to your list of favourites
Should you want to write a review of a new pop release, chart-topping CD, highlight a lost classic, or make a list of records that you think are overrated ? you can do that now on the Guardian website. More than 3 million albums now have their own page on our site, with information on the record including its track listing plus the open invitation for you to tell us ? as well as your fellow music fans ? what you think about it.
This sort of thing used to be the exclusive domain of the professional pop critic, but as Alexis Petridis has described elsewhere, that great enabler, the internet, has let more people than ever have a crack at doing his job ... and that (as he concedes) can only be a good thing.
It's not that the Guardian and Observer won't continue to publish more from our award-winning team of writers: our critics are committed to telling you about the best, and worst, albums of the week, every week. But our critics can't review everything ? so you can now help fill in the gaps in our musical knowledge.
If you don't want to write a full album review, but simply give it a star rating, you can do that too. Just click the "add your rating" link at the top of the album page. Or ? in the same way that you can create lists of your favourite artists (and more besides) ? you can add any record to one of our pre-set lists, which are as follows:
My favourite albums
Best albums of all time
Worst albums of all time
Lost classics
Overrated albums
Underrated albums
Guilty pleasures: the albums I can't help but love
Best albums of 2011
Best album covers of all time
Worst album covers of all time
To help kick-start some discussion, , which itself will start a new series on the subject on guardian.co.uk/music. We'll also aim to write a weekly blog, rounding up your reviews that have caught our eye.
How to find the album pages
Our developers are still working on a search tool to make it easier for you to find these pages, but in the meantime the easiest thing to do is to look up an artist page (this A-Z list of popular artists is a good place to start, or there are more detailed instructions here) where, for the most part, the links to all their album pages can be found.
And if you read our critics' opinions and feel inspired to write your own, there will be a link to the album page on our reviews from now on (where a MusicBrainz ID exists for the album).
Alternatively you can search on MusicBrainz for the release group of the album you want to review, and paste the release group ID onto the end of this url:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/album/
So, for example, the page for Legendary Weapons would be:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/album/e5d7a6f6-7d80-461d-b9e5-0d24c233c679
(Already someone has developed a handy bookmarklet that makes the whole process easier - thanks!)
If you want an even more technically-minded explanation of how we've created these pages, you can get that here.
Tell us what you think
It's important to note that this is just one more phase of a larger redevelopment of the Guardian's music site: we'll be introducing other features and new ideas in the months ahead, as well as improving the things we've already made available to you. Of course, we'd love your feedback, so tell us what works for you and what doesn't and what else you might like to see using the comments thread below.
It's our hope that these pages won't simply serve as a valuable resource; they should be fun to play with, and a chance for you to express all your passions and opinions as a music fan. So, now, it's over to you ...
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2011/aug/02/write-album-reviews
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