Rolling Stone has a new album rating system. It's the Old Rolling Stone Album Rating System

Like any publication that ever existed Rolling rock has thrown his share of failed curveballs – from sending free roach clips to readers in 1968 to putting the very hairy band Blind Melon on the cover, completely naked, in 1993. What's important about them The weird decisions it's that we've seen the error of our ways and learned from our mistakes (usually). There has never been a Rolling rock coke spoon promotion and we didn't follow up the Blind Melon nude cover with a Candlebox nude cover.

We recently went through a similar learning process with our record reviews. It's a bit of baseball inside, so bear with us. For decades, RS had used a star system to rate albums. A classic album got five stars, an excellent album got four stars, up to one star for albums considered “poor”. Then in 2022, we decided to abandon this system and go with two ratings – “Hear This” for good albums and “Instant Classic” for instant classics. Anything worse than that simply didn't get a rating. At the time, we explained our decision by saying, “If you're a dedicated music fan in 2022, your opinion won't be determined by some random number.” The move wasn't exactly met with street riots. But if you're old Rolling rock Kremlinologist, you surely noticed.

It turns out that the Hear This/Instant Classic game was an instant classic example of an experiment that didn't really work. Having only two ratings proved too limiting. A clear, well-defined system that lets readers know what we think of a record – from greatest masterpiece to dumbest – worked perfectly. And now it will work perfectly once again. Well, to quote James Brown's introduction by Fats Gonder Live at Apollo, “It's time for the stars!” Again.

Now, for a little refresher, here's a guide to Rolling Stone's critical cosmology.

Five: A classic. This album is perfect in every way and is destined to be a huge influence on the course of music for years and years to come.
Half past four: Incredible, but we need more time to tell if it's a classic. Look for it to top our album of the year list.
Four: Super. It's important and impressive and almost every song on the album is great. Even listeners who don't always like that artist or genre will immediately recognize how good it is.
Half past three: Exceptional. If you like this genre, you will like this record. If you like the artist in question, you'll love this.
Three. Good. The artist did what they do and it turned out fine.
Two and a half: Q. Either the artist tried something different and it didn't work out, or they just weren't on their game this time.
Two Exhibition. Even if you're a really big fan, you'd have to engage in some pretty high-level magical thinking to make this look good.
one and a half: Get over it.
A Poor. You'll definitely want to check this one out, if only to enjoy the range and scope of its sheer awfulness.