Record Club Is a Letterboxd-Style App for Music Lovers

Letterboxd has created a cozy online space for film lovers to get together—those who truly appreciate the art form, and who want to compile lists, aggregate ratings, and share their movie opinions with others. Its success has led to other similar platforms appearing in its slipstream, such as Binge.

Record Club, which actually first opened its doors a couple of years ago, is continuing to grow and getting more attention as a potential Letterboxd for music enthusiasts. Music has been a major part of my life since my teens—across cassette tapes, CDs, MP3s, and streaming services—so I was keen to give it a try.

The snap verdict after a few days: It definitely gets a lot right, from the elegant look of the interface to the depth you can go down to when it comes to logging the details of your listening history. If you’re looking for somewhere to share your music tastes and track your listening, it’s worth a look.

Record Club is free to use with no ads, with a $4-per-month subscription available if you want to support the project. You get some extras such as better list management and the ability to choose preferred cover art in your library. You also get extensive personalized stats, and the ability to add personalized notes to releases.

Record Club is easy to navigate

When you first sign up for Record Club, you’ll be given a quick tour of the interface and the features, and it’s a well laid-out app on both web and mobile: There’s lots of white space and text that’s crisp and bold, and it’s easy to read. Right away, you can see what’s popular with other users, new releases coming up, and reviews that have been left on the platform.

Click through on any album, and you get a bunch of information about it. There’s the track listing, plus details on how popular the album is on the Record Club network (its average rating and number of listeners, as well as reviews). You can see when it was originally released, and its total running time.

Everything is very clickable, searchable, and social. Follow a link to another user (you’ll be given suggestions for who to follow as soon as you get started), and you get to see what they’re currently listening to, their top five records, the reviews they’ve left on releases, and which upcoming releases they’re planning to listen to.

Your own profile will be viewable by default: You can make changes to it by clicking on your avatar (top right), then choosing Settings > Profile. Switch to Preferences and you get to control some of the ways that Record Club works, and under Privacy you can choose what’s shown on your profile, or make it private (so only people who know your username will be able to find you).

You can bring previous listening data over from Rate Your Music or Last.fm (which I’m a particular fan of), and imports from Spotify are apparently coming soon. Your Record Club data can be exported as and when needed, so you don’t have to worry about your listening history staying trapped here forever.

The headers along the top of the web interface link to the key sections of the platform: Browse (for checking out new music), Community (for checking out what other listeners are up to), and Activity (for reviewing your own listening). It’s really when you start to use the tracking and social features of Record Club that it comes into its own, and when the Letterboxd comparisons become most apt.

How to get started with Record Club

You can start sharing what you’re listening to by heading to the Record Club home page and clicking Add release under Your rotation. Your rotation is where you log what you’re currently listening to, and you can have five albums (or singles or EPs) here—if you try to add a sixth, you’ll be prompted to remove one of the existing entries first.