Reviewing an album as a single number is lossy. A soundtrack can have three transcendent cues buried among twenty pieces of functional underscore — so what's the "score," exactly? Our answer is to rate every track individually, then summarize those ratings two different ways. Each album gets both numbers, and the gap between them is often the most interesting part.
Track-weighted: every track counts equally
The track-weighted score is the simple average of every track's rating. One track, one vote. It answers a blunt question: if you hit shuffle, how good is the typical track?
This number punishes filler. Albums padded with short transitional cues — alternate takes, fifteen-second stingers, source music — tend to score lower here, because each of those weak tracks drags the average down just as hard as a masterpiece lifts it.
Time-weighted: longer tracks count more
The time-weighted score weights each track's rating by its runtime. A brilliant nine-minute centerpiece counts for far more than a throwaway thirty-second interlude — which is closer to how you actually experience an album front to back.
Mathematically it's the sum of (rating × seconds) divided by total seconds. It rewards composers who put their best ideas in their biggest, most-developed pieces.
The gap is the story
Compare the two numbers and you learn something real:
- When time > track, the album's longest pieces are its best. The composer saved their strongest writing for the centerpieces. (Most of our top-ranked albums look like this.)
- When track > time, the short pieces punch above their weight and the long ones sag — or there's simply less filler than usual.
- When they're nearly identical, quality is even across the runtime regardless of length — a sign of a tightly curated album.
A note on tracks rated above 5
Occasionally a track is so exceptional it earns a rating above 5 — our way of flagging the rare piece that breaks the scale. Those land in the Hall of Fame, and yes, they can pull an album's score above what a strict 5-cap would allow. That's intentional: greatness should be able to register.
Every score on this site is computed directly from the underlying per-track ratings — nothing is entered by hand — so the rankings always reflect the data. Dig into any review and you'll see the track-by-track ratings the numbers are built from.