About TakeRank

TakeRank is a free album ranker for people who care about music. Instead of pulling a ranking from a critics' list or a streaming algorithm, you build your own. You pick an artist, you get pairs of their albums, and you say which one you prefer. Do that a few times and a personal ranking of their discography takes shape - and every vote also feeds a global, community-wide leaderboard for albums, songs and artists.

There is no filling in star ratings and no writing reviews. You just pick a favourite when two records sit side by side. It turns out that is a far more honest way to find out what you actually rate, because comparing two albums head to head is a question you can always answer, even when giving something a number out of ten leaves you stuck.

Every album and song on TakeRank has a rating produced by the Elo system - the same maths used to rank chess players. Each one starts at 1000, and every head-to-head vote nudges both ratings based on who won and how far apart they were. Beating a higher-rated album earns a bigger jump; a predictable result barely moves the needle. Over enough votes the numbers settle into a shape that genuinely reflects what a community prefers, rather than what it was told to admire.

It does not care how famous an artist is or how much they sell. There is no weighting by recency or popularity. Volume matters only because more votes make a rating more confident, not because loud records get a head start. That is the whole point: a ranking earned one comparison at a time.

Artist and album information on TakeRank comes from MusicBrainz, the open music encyclopedia maintained by listeners and contributors around the world. That is what gives TakeRank a much wider catalogue than the handful of categories you would see on a streaming service, including the cult records and niche scenes as well as the household names.

Album artwork is sourced from Deezer and the Cover Art Archive. We are grateful to all three projects - TakeRank simply would not exist without the open music data they maintain.