Hard to know what's good in new music these days, isn't it? Also kinda tough to find legitimate reviews for what's new. That's because music reviews are victims of the third cause of broken-ness.
Inherent conflicts of interest arise from incentive schemes. Also known as, you want access, you better give us a reason to give you access.
Ever wonder why even the worst movies have some critic blurbing about how awesome it is on the poster? Well, that's because by shamelessly sucking up to the studio, you can get your blurb on a poster--it's a way for hack writers to get their name out, and it happens all the time. And it's not just movies, it happens in any situation where someone is critical of someone else but requires the consent of that someone else to get access to whatever it is they're criticizing.
Reviews, the White House Press Corps, everywhere. Although sometimes it's not about access but about advertising, and that's where the phenomena is the most blatant. There was a row a while back about Gamespot firing an employee for giving a bad review to a game whose ads were plastered all over the website. You see how the incentives line up. My website reviews games, it's frequented by gamers, and my revenue source becomes game makers, so it behooves me to not shit on their product.
But if you look at critic aggregators like MetaCritic (useful in this example because it reviews both games and music), you see that there are plenty of people doling out bad video game reviews. Check out their page for (picking a systems at random) the Wii and you see scores all over the place, which is about what you'd expect: lots of greens, lots of yellows, a few reds (the greys are as-yet-unrated). Ditto their movie page.
But take a trip over to music-land and what do you see? Solid green, with a sprinkling of yellow. It looks like a surreally-healthy lawn in here. But when's the last time you read a negative review? You never do, because there's no money in writing negative reviews. Just take a look at the exceptions. MetaCritic lists only eleven albums as "bad" since 2000. Bear in mind that MC doesn't write reviews, it only tabulates what other reviewers have said. The worst reviewed album, with a score of 15 points (and a 13-point lead on second place), is Kevin Federline's Playing With Fire, an album that no one ever expected to take seriously. Hell, even Paris Hilton got a 57 for her vanity project.
To get an idea of just how worthless music reviews are, read this Hitsville article that recalls Rolling Stone's reviews of R.E.M. records from Accelerate back to Up, a chronicle of that great band's waning years, a string of solid "meh". You'll see how every single album review decries the previous albums and calls this new work their best record ever.
Entertaining read.
Sadly, I really don't think music reviews can be saved. The album is dead and music is such an experiential medium these days, it's not any trouble to just take a listen for yourself. Unlike a movie, it's not a $10, 2-hour investment, and thankfully film has it's own sort of "critic culture" that has kept it less susceptible to this sort of atrophy. But time, as always, will tell.
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