How verified listens work

The short version

On sleevenotes, anyone can rate or review any album — but only ratings backed by a verified listencount toward an album's community score. A verified listen means your connected streaming history shows you actually played the album. No listen, no vote. Your unverified take still appears on your own profile and in your friends' activity, clearly badged, so your opinion is never silenced — it just doesn't move the number.

How we verify a listen

When you connect Apple Music or Last.fm, sleevenotes syncs your listening history in the background. As plays accumulate against an album's tracklist, we track your completion of the record. Once you've heard the album through, your rating and review for it are marked verified — the badge you see next to scores around the site.

Syncing runs automatically every few hours. A listen you finished this morning may take a little while to show up; you don't need to do anything to claim it.

Why bother?

Online music discussion is full of scores dropped by people who never pressed play — review bombs, hype waves, drive-by ratings. Requiring a real listen filters all of that out at the source. When you see an album's verified score on sleevenotes, you know every single number behind it came from someone who sat with the record.

What about ratings without streaming?

If you haven't connected a streaming service — or you heard the album on vinyl, at a friend's place, anywhere we can't see — you can still rate and review. Those entries live on your profile with an unverified badge. They're part of your record; they just don't feed the community aggregate.

Ready to make your listens count? Connect Apple Music or Last.fm in settings.