Individual song polls

I don't understand why you wouldn't use the entirety of the scale. You're only comparing Maiden songs to each other, and not Maiden songs to the rest of human music. The ratings are numbers, not words. I don't understand why you wouldn't give your least favourite song the lowest possible rating on a scale only used by you to rate only these songs.
 
I prefer to rate in absolute terms.
Perun said:
I don't understand why you wouldn't give your least favourite song the lowest possible rating on a scale only used by you to rate only these songs.
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I don't know how you come to this conclusion. I am following LC's absolute definitions.
 
It's up to Foro how he wants to rate the songs at the end of the day. I like having my higher ratings having more weight by giving out 7's onwards infrequently.

7's for me are pretty much the standard I hold Maiden too normally. It's what I'd call my Maiden average, above the normal average of a 5/10.
 
Perun said:
I don't understand why you wouldn't use the entirety of the scale.
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Why would I?

Not a single rating event in the worlds works like this. If a jury gives ratings in a sport event, they don't have to give a 1 to the worst. I have no clue where this desire is coming from. I don't have it.
 
But this is not an absolute poll! You're only comparing Maiden songs to each other, and this poll will never be a reference to anything else. It will never include anything but Maiden songs. You can give your own definition of what the numbers mean, what LC posted was merely a suggestion.

Songs don't have feelings. They won't be hurt if they are rated below 4.
 
I have absolute thoughts about Maiden songs. ;) Not just uttered in a grade, but uttered in words (in my mind, or on this forum). Often, I can still find good aspects in a Maiden song, even if they are among the least good. Not that these absolute thoughts never change, but I form a thought and then I pick a grade fitting that context. I am more busy with the quality of a particular track than with having to hand out all numbers of a scale.
Perun said:
Songs don't have feelings.
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I get what you mean, but I do have feelings for songs. It all depends on these feelings. Since I do not utterly hate any Maiden song, it doesn't feel right for me to give a 1. It does not block me in any way to compare Maiden songs to each other. If I gave a 7 to three songs, I could still decide which I like the most, and which I like the least.
 
Well, it seems like we will never agree on this. In my opinion, none of your points are contradictory with a scale in which the lowest end is defined by your least favourite song and which is merely called '1' for convention's or brevity's sake. It also appears pointless to me to employ a scale of which by the outset you already know you'll refuse to use almost half of it. To me, it doesn't have anything to do with 'utterly hating' anything, but just with logic. But as I said, we will likely never agree on this.
 
If I really wanted to do this, we would get people to order songs and grade them on a bell curve.
 
The thing is, Perun, if Foro's already graded Maiden in absolute terms (which he implies he has) why does he have to bother converting this to a 1-10 scale? This is just a whole load of work which he probably can't be bothered with. It doesn't seem that difficult to understand.

I use Windows Media Player's five star rating for some of my music. And although I like your idea of grading an artist in isolation (using 1-5; or your 1-10 for finer grading), I don't. I grade in absolute terms, meaning neither Maiden or Buckethead (two artists I rate highly) have anything less than three star ratings.
 
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Yes but you probably wouldn't even have a bunch of low-rated songs or albums that have only 1-2 stars songs (meaning songs you wouldn't ever play) on your media player
So you can renumber the ratings of songs you do have, so "1" means not-so-good-but-still-good-enough-not-to-press-delete (Apparition for instance)
 
I have thought a bit longer about this and I think I have come to the essence... the essence of the advantage absolute grading has over relative grading (in which every grade has to be awarded, to cover the total spectrum).

In short: an absolute grade really says something about the individual like factor of a song, on its own. It defines judgement. It summarizes a total of negative and positive aspects.

I'll show it with some examples:

If two people vote "the relative way" and both give a 1 for the same song. What do we know? Do we know that this song sits at the very bottom of all Maiden songs, for these persons? Or do we know if the song sits in a group of 10 or 20 or 30 Maiden "least" good songs? If someone terribly hates Maiden, more than half of the songs could have a 1. One person could see the song with a 1 as one of his least favourite songs, but still doesn't avoid like the plague, like the other person is doing, cursing it (with his eye) and hating it terribly much. So what do we know? We don't know. In theory, we know nothing. Apart from a ranking of a song in the total. But we do not really know the context. We do not know why a song is at a certain position. It's the total of unknown subjective randomness. We do not know what someone thinks about a song. There's is no individual aspect to be deduced.

If one person votes "the relative way", e.g. gives a song a 2 because the song is in the top half of his lowest 20 percent (or whatever subjective own other method is used) of all Maiden songs, but still this person tolerates it, and stamps it as "unsufficient", or "weak"..
And another person does it "the absolute way", e.g. has the same feelings about the song, but gives it a 4 or 5...
Then what do we know? With the first person we cannot see from the grade how he likes the song. At most, we could try to see a position in someone's ranking, although we do not really know it, because we do not know how the distribution of grades is done (e.g. the following is possible if we pretend Maiden has 150 songs and an even distribution of grades is desired: 15x10, 15x9, 15x8, 15x7, 15x6, 15x5, 15x4, 15x3, 15x2, 15x1, but there are dozens of other possibilities).
We can see it from the 2nd person (if some known system is used). But what is such a mix worth? Not much either.

So in the end, it's the best when everybody uses absolute -generally known- definitions for grades. This way, we both can value the individual appreciation, and the total.
 
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Forostar said:
So, in the end, the best is when everybody uses absolute -generally known- definitions for grades. This way, we both can value the individual appreciation, and the total.
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That's why I posted a grade system, that I hope people will generally stick to.
 
It'd be hard for me to run through and vote a number for each song..I love all Maiden. The only song I could even really think of giving a rating below a 7 would be The Apparition, and that's pretty much it. All of my ratings would be too high.
 
I rate each Maiden song on how I feel about it and not how anyone else views it.
It's about what I felt both when the song was first released and also has the song stood the test of time.
Also I do not take other bands/music into consideration when deciding whether a Maiden song is good or not.
The song is either good or it isn't. It's just a matter of determining how good, average or bad it is.
 
It's going to take me a while to determine exactly how I will use the rating scale (i.e. will I give any song a 1-4? or will I actually be able to encompass the entire scale in my rankings?) but I do plan on being thorough and precise in my voting once it begins. I will also rank the songs on each album from best to worst. That is actually a little bit easier for me. Iron Maiden coming up soon.
 
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