How head-to-head ranking works

Star ratings have a problem: almost everyone gives four or five stars to almost everything. A great show and a merely good one end up looking the same on a five-point scale, which makes the scale useless for the one thing you actually want, knowing which nights really stood out.

SoundOff skips stars entirely. Instead, you rank shows head-to-head. Log two sets, and SoundOff occasionally asks you a simple question: which was better? You pick one. That’s it. No scoring, no deciding if a night was a 7 or an 8.

Each comparison you make refines your list. The more shows you’ve compared, the more accurate your ranking gets, since a single vote between two sets tells SoundOff far more than a star rating ever could. Under the hood this works like a rating system used in chess and competitive games, where a win against a strong opponent counts for more than a win against a weak one. You don’t need to think about any of that. You just pick the better show when asked.

You’ll see a few related actions as you use it. Rank is your first comparison for a newly logged set, the one that gets it onto your list at all. Re-Rank lets you challenge that placement later if you’ve changed your mind, maybe a show grew on you after a few weeks, or one you loved in the moment didn’t hold up. Re-rate is for adjusting a set’s own notes and details without touching its position on your list.

Not every log needs to be ranked right away. A journal entry, a quick note about a night with a couple of photos, can sit in your history unranked until you’re ready to compare it. SoundOff tracks this with a simple flag behind the scenes (needs_rating) and a running comparison_count for each set, but all you’ll notice is that newer or lightly-logged entries get folded into the ranking flow as you keep comparing.

The result, over time, is a personal top ten, top fifty, whatever you want to scroll to, built entirely from your own head-to-head calls. Not an average of ratings across a fanbase. Not a critic’s number. Just the shows that actually beat other shows, according to you.

You won’t get asked to compare every possible pair of shows in your history, that would take forever and most of those matchups wouldn’t tell you anything new anyway. SoundOff prioritizes comparisons that actually move your list, usually between shows that are close in the current ranking or between a newly logged set and something nearby it. A show you saw last week might get compared against something from two years ago if the system thinks that matchup will teach it something. You’ll rarely be asked to compare two shows that clearly aren’t close.

One thing worth knowing if you’re the kind of fan who tracks this closely: your list isn’t locked in after the first pass. Tastes shift. A show that felt like a career-best in the moment sometimes settles lower once you’ve compared it against a few more nights and had time to sit with it. That’s normal, and it’s exactly what Re-Rank is for, revisiting a placement once your gut tells you it’s off. There’s no penalty for changing your mind, and no cap on how many times you can revisit a set.

Curious what this looks like against other letterboxd-style approaches to live music? There’s more on that comparison elsewhere on the site. For now, the fastest way to understand ranking is to try it.

Open your timeline and rank a set. The list gets sharper every time you do.