Updated September 2026
Letterboxd for music: every app compared
People ask this on Reddit every week and always get the same 3 answers: Rate Your Music, Album of the Year, Last.fm. The first two are websites from the 2000s and the last one doesn’t even do ratings. Here’s the whole field as of September 2026, including the app I make, with the places where each one falls short.
By Ben, the creator of Rate.fm. Full disclosure. I’ve tried to keep this fair, though. If something below is wrong, it’s probably just a mistake.
TL;DR
- Closest to Letterboxd as an app: Rate.fm. Diary, ratings out of 10, reviews, lists, friends, critic scores, native iPhone app
- Biggest database and charts: Rate Your Music, by a wide margin, if you can live with a website from 2000. Rate.fm can show the RYM community’s reviews next to its own if you turn that on in settings.
- Critic scores next to user scores: Album of the Year on the web, with the biggest new-release comment culture. Rate.fm in an app, 71,000 reviews from 19 publications.
- On Android: Rate.fm on the web for now. Record Club or Echo if you need a native app.
- Listening stats: Rate.fm gives every profile its own stats page, and you can ask the AI questions about your own listening. Last.fm is the dedicated scrobbler and works on every platform. The stats apps are compared separately at rate.fm/music-stats-apps.
- Recommendations: Rate.fm has an AI you can talk to that recommends from what you’ve rated and played, plus a daily pick. Last.fm’s automated recommendations are the other option people rate highly.
- Leaving Musicboard: export first at rate.fm/musicboard, then pick.
What “Letterboxd for music” actually means
Letterboxd works because it’s five things at once: a diary of what you’ve watched, your rating, a place to write, lists, and friends whose taste you can see. A music version needs the same five, plus one additional thing: a way to rate the song or album while it’s still playing, because you listen to music while doing other stuff.
The comparison
How this was put together: each app’s own site and store listings, plus the last six months of r/musicboard, r/Letterboxd, and r/Music threads asking this question, which is where the “falls short” comes from.
| App | iPhone app | Android app | Website | Rating scale | Written reviews | Lists | Follow friends | Critic scores | Rate from the Lock Screen | Play what you’re reading | Imports Musicboard | Listening stats | AI you can talk to | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rate.fm | ✓ | – | ✓ | 0 to 10 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Free, no ads |
| Rate Your Music | – | – | ✓ | 0.5 to 5 stars | ✓ | ✓ | ~ | – | – | – | – | – | – | Free with ads |
| Album of the Year | – | – | ✓ | 0 to 100 | ✓ | ✓ | ~ | ✓ | – | – | – | – | – | Free with ads |
| Musicboard | ✓ | – | ✓ | 0.5 to 5 stars | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | – | – | – | – | – | – | Free, paid tier |
| Record Club | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Stars | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | – | – | – | – | – | – | Free |
| Echo | ✓ | ✓ | – | Rankings | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | – | – | – | – | – | – | Free |
| Last.fm | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | None | – | – | ✓ | – | – | – | – | ✓ | – | Free, Pro tier |
✓ yes · – no · ~ partly (RYM and AOTY let you follow people but have no real feed of what they’re playing). Checked against each site in September 2026.
Each one, honestly
Rate.fm
A native iPhone app plus a website. Albums and songs scored 0 to 10, written reviews, lists and tier lists, and a feed of what your friends are playing and rating right now. It connects to Apple Music or Spotify so you rate the song while it’s still playing, from the Lock Screen, and you can press play on anything you’re reading about. The catalog is 226,000 albums and 563,000 songs, and 71,000 critic reviews from 19 publications on the album pages. 23,000 reviews from Pitchfork alone. Every profile has its own listening stats page, so what you played and how much is next to what you rated. And there is an AI you can talk to about anything in music. It knows what you’ve rated and played, answers questions about your listening, and recommends from everything. It also gives you a song and album picked every day. Free, no ads. Where it falls short: no Android app yet, and the community is smaller than the two big websites.
Rate Your Music
The biggest database in music, and the deepest charts, going since 2000. Ratings in half stars out of five, reviews, lists, and a genre tree that no other platform has. It’s a website only, with no app, and the interface shows its age. If you want the most complete catalog and don’t care about an app or user experience, this is the reference. Its ratings CSV export lets you export your history whenever you want. But if what you’d miss from RYM is the reviews, Rate.fm shows the RYM reviews if you turn on a setting in the app.
Album of the Year
The place to see critic scores and user scores side by side, out of 100, with a lively comment culture around new releases especially. Web only, and it’s ad-supported. Good for following what critics and the crowd think of this week’s albums, but not so good as a personal diary.
Musicboard
For a few years this was really the closest thing to a real Letterboxd for music: an iPhone app with ratings, reviews, lists, and friends. Since early 2026, it has suffered long outages, and the Android app was removed from Google Play. Unfortunately, it never had an official export option. Its subreddit is mostly now people asking where to go. If your ratings are there, get them out before they disappear.
Record Club
A newer, web-first option built on the MusicBrainz catalog, so niche and brand-new records are easy to find or add. Rate.fm pulls from MusicBrainz too when Apple Music doesn’t have something, but Record Club runs on it entirely, so obscure projects are more front and center there. The most common complaint in the threads is that the community is still thin.
Echo
iPhone and Android apps with rankings, hot takes, and charts among friends. The developer is also active. No website yet. Musicboard refugees split between Echo and Record Club, and the main knock in the threads is that the interface isn’t very good.
Last.fm
Not a Letterboxd at all, but it gets recommended in every thread. It scrobbles everything you play and turns it into stats and charts on every platform. The base plan is free. It has no ratings and no reviews, though. It’s fine as a scrobbler if you want your stats on every platform. Rate.fm has the stats built in, though, so most people won’t need both.
Bring your ratings with you
The main reason people stay on an app that has mostly been outgrown is because they have so many years of ratings in it. If yours are still on Musicboard, rate.fm/musicboard downloads all of them as a CSV, no account needed, and moves them into Rate.fm in one tap if you want.
Questions people ask
Is there a Letterboxd for music?
Yes. Rate.fm is the Letterboxd for music: an iPhone app and website where you log what you listen to, rate it out of 10, write reviews, make lists, and follow friends. You can see critic scores as well. This is the only one that lets you rate the song while it’s still playing from the Lock Screen. Rate Your Music and Album of the Year are the biggest websites in the space, but have no app. The comparison table on this page covers every serious option.
What happened to Musicboard?
Musicboard has had long outages since early 2026, and its Android app was pulled from Google Play. It never shipped an export option. If you have ratings there, rate.fm/musicboard downloads every rating, review, and list as a CSV for free. Then you can import them into Rate.fm in one tap, if you want.
Does Rate Your Music have an app?
No. Rate Your Music is a website. It has the largest database of any option and detailed charts, but no iPhone or Android app.
Which one is free?
Rate.fm, Record Club, and Echo are free with no ads. Rate Your Music and Album of the Year are free with ads. Musicboard and Last.fm have paid tiers.
Can I move my ratings between apps?
From Musicboard, yes: rate.fm/musicboard exports everything as a CSV and imports it into Rate.fm. Rate Your Music offers its own CSV export of your ratings. Most of the other apps have no export at all, so check before you commit years of ratings to one.
Try the one that’s a real app.
Get Rate.fm for iPhoneFree, no ads. Also on the web at Rate.fm.