well, the battle is part of the website, and it requires songs to be rated.

I think it could be an idea to make the "song accepts rating" optional, just like the free download possibility. After all we want the artists themselves to be in final control of what happens to their music...

I don't think the rating bit is necessarily egotistic. I personally find it very useful to the see percentage going up or down on my song threads, since this is telling me something about how people are receiving the tune. You can call your music piece "art", but in the end, art exists to inspire or provoke thought and/or emotion, to communicate it's own aesthetic. Getting a rating to it could be a signal of how well this is translating to the observer... or would you rather have your observers become dehumanized - - without the egotistical parts telling them to either like or not like what they are presented?

Personally, I rate songs to construction, performance, production quality and marketability... I try to leave my own taste out of it - though with "marketability" I do not necessarily mean "possible sales figures", I mean... "is there an audience for this song?" or, in extremes: "can it form the basis of a new subculture? will it give birth to a whole new genre of sounds?", and the vision of this, naturally, takes shape through my own experience and views of the (music) world. So yeah my own taste is seeping through in there yeah.

Anyway, it's just how you define the rating system... But luckily there are only very few members on this site who judge songs only to what mood they're in... And trust me, their accounts tend to have a very short life span...