How We Score
Every album on TuneScout comes with a detailed content read. Here's how it works, and more importantly, what it means.
The philosophy
We don't rate quality. We don't tell you whether an album is good. That's your job.
What we do is map what's actually on the record. Language, themes, intensity, context, across every track. Think of it as the information that's always been there in the music. We just write it down.
A record can score high on our scale and still be a masterpiece. Most of the best ones do.
How it works
Our analysis reads every lyric on every track and scores the album across eight dimensions. Things like language, sexual themes, violence, substance references, and darker subject matter. Each gets a score from 1 to 10.
A 1 means it's essentially absent. A 10 means it's the defining texture of the record. Most albums sit somewhere in the middle, because most music lives in the middle.
You'll see the full breakdown on every album page. The overall shape at a glance, and the detail when you want it.
Context matters
This isn't a word count. A song about overcoming addiction scores differently than a song celebrating it. Reclaimed language is handled with the nuance it deserves. Genre conventions are acknowledged. What's standard in one tradition may be surprising in another.
We're not perfect. No system that reads thousands of albums will be. But we're consistent, transparent, and always improving.
What the scores are not
They're not quality ratings. A high score doesn't mean a bad album. It means an intense one.
They're not moral judgments. We don't believe any score makes a record inappropriate. We believe in giving you the information to decide that for yourself.