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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
so metacritic was used because it lets you look at stats very easily, and you can spot changes in trends without having to resort to claims such as "back in my day, a critic would...."
pretty well written article actually. touches on things like fan harassment of critics enabled by social media which incentivizes people to gush over garbage.
here are the last 2 paragraphs:
Stephen Thomas Erlewine, senior pop editor at TiVo and a long-time music critic, says a positive development is that critics have become more diverse and fairer to subgenres such as nu-metal that were dismissed in the past. Critics, he says, should focus on what an album means, not just whether it’s good or bad. Yet he worries that the narrowing focus on megastars—all those positive reviews, nuanced think-pieces and fun lists—is fueling a trend where pop’s 1% get more and more popular at everyone else’s expense.
“Music criticism, like journalism in general, is the first draft of history,” he says. “Without some sort of writing about what’s happening in the culture, we’re going to be poorer in the future.”
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Hmm... I'm not sure about that second bit. The kind of music criticism aggregated by Metacritic (reviews using metrics) and actual music writing are different beasts entirely. Interviews and features about musicians, sure, those are at least broadly speaking, part of that historical process. That writing should be spread out, and it is. But the two-paragraph, 1-5-star reviews in rolling stone or the daily rarely-below-6, rarely-above-8/10 Pitchfork reviews? Nah. An album is reviewed along with 5-10 others and that's it... it goes away the next day, no matter how big the artist is. In fact, I think the "biggest" artists are less big than they ever have been. Kanye and Jay-Z and Taylor and Beyoncé may take up a ton of the tabloid space, but I think as a "ruling class" they're significantly less dominant than the big artists of previous generations. The review for the albums they put out once every three aren't taking up any more space than the lesser-knowns on that front. They're just likely at the top of the screen, or closest to the front page of the magazine. For that day, or for that issue, respectively.
They're also all HATED by a massive chunk of the population. So many people hate Taylor and Kanye and Jay and Bey and Kendrick and Drake and so on, it's insane. It's a weird deal.
Methinks he thininks a bit too highly of the significance of the job. It's being done by MILLIONS of people, mostly for free, and being consumed constantly by anyone with a smartphone.