In a time when album sales are on a sharp decline and commercial music superstars have fallen by the wayside, numerous independent Web sites have begun to reassess the criteria by which a “popular song” is measured.

Such is the case with Rank ‘em, a grassroots-oriented Web site community started by four University students. The mission: to give bands’ and artists’ biggest fans a voice, providing them with entire catalogs of songs to choose to rank.

“It’s not going to be based on commercial factors like CD sales or radio airplay,” said Adam Wexler, founder and CEO of the Rank ‘em project. “It’s strictly going to be determined by the fans.”

Wexler graduated from the University in Dec. 2007 with a major in real estate and was a member of the inaugural class of the Terry Music Business Certificate Program.

Wexler was inspired to create Rank ‘em as a means to combat what he saw as the unrealistic representation of artists’ most popular songs on mainstream music distributors such as Amazon and iTunes.

“Other sites’ charts are based on what’s going to sell the most – what’s going to make them the most money,” he said. “That should not have a reflection on what our rankings are. We’re inviting the fans to take an artist and explore their catalog deeper.”

To help realize his goal, Wexler teamed up with University alumnus Danny Kirschner, grad student Piyush Parate and senior Adam Blaschke to create Rank ‘em.

Kirschner, who graduated in August 2008 with a major in management information systems, deals with design and strategy. Parate, who is working toward a master’s in computer science, specializes in search optimization. Blaschke, a computer science major, handles the technical responsibilities, including coding the Web site’s framework.

Similar to other successful fan-based music sites such as RateYourMusic, Rank ‘em aims to displace commercial influence on music’s popularity.

However, there is one major difference. As Wexler pointed out, “There’s an inherent difference between ratings and rankings. With ratings, everyone’s on the same level. [But] when it comes to rankings, you specifically know what is the number one song and all the way down because it’s based on a point system and is much more exact.”

Rank ‘em’s point system closely mirrors that of college football polls: A user can rank between five and 20 songs at a time by a specific artist, and the songs are assigned points accordingly. The song ranked at No. 1 receives 20 points; No. 2 receives 19 points, and so on.

The Web site also features a “fanstanding” scale, which allows users to rate themselves as fans of a group on a scale of one to 10.

Because Rank ‘em is, so far, non-profit and grassroots-based, Wexler and company are relying on Athens music fans to give the Rank ‘em community clout.

“We’re crowd-sourcing our solutions,” Wexler said. “We’re depending on the wisdom of the crowds to provide the answers.”

“As far as an Athens focus, we want to have a grassroots thing and start from the bottom up and include local artists like Corey Smith, Dead Confederate and the Modern Skirts [on the site],” Kirschner said.

Rank ‘em has been in development for 19 months, and is in private alpha testing mode – not yet open to the general public but accessible to a small group of users.

“We want our database to reach a comfortable stage where we can let it open to the public, where regular users can use those rankings to discover more music,” Parate said.

Though the Rank ‘em crew is working on perfecting the Web site and creating a comprehensive database, the site’s artist list already includes more than 400,00 and continues to grow.

“Over time, when you put everybody’s results together, the best songs are naturally going to rise to the top,” Wexler said. “It can only get better. With every single input it’ll get better. That’s the hope.”