Has Music Criticism Become Obsolete?

text: Michael Raine | photography: Brian Patterson

“Let’s face it, if you can hear a song on the radio it will influence you to buy that record much more than anything you read.”

Question: “Do you think there’s any justification for being a rock critic? What makes your opinion better than the average guy out there on Sixth Avenue?”
Answer: “Nothing. Let him do it!”

• Music critic Lester Bangs. April, 1982. His last interview.

Like many members of the proletariat masses, I read movie reviews or check IMDB ratings before heading to the theatre to drop $12 on a movie and another $15 for a bag of stale popcorn and a pop. However, I have never scanned Rolling Stone’s review section or Googled the Pitchfork rating of an album before heading to the record store. Why is this? It’s because the old fashioned music review, which still dominates the back pages of most music magazines and a substantial part of most music websites, is obsolete.

Like pagers, TV Guide, and the curtained-off porn section at the movie rental store – or the movie rental store itself – increasingly easy access to more and better information has made the music reviews unnecessary.

Despite a multitude of problems that have always existed with music reviews, they still served a practical purpose for decades. Before the Internet age, reviews acted as a consumer guide, a way for music fans to gauge what was worth their money. Only music critics had easy access to all  albums before they were released and were able to listen to everything, the classics and the crap, in order to find the gems.

Their wordy and convoluted analysis would grace the pages of Rolling Stone, Cream, The Village Voice, and Spin. Even if normal people had no idea what the hell critics were talking about or why it’s brilliant that Patti Smith’s Horses wasn’t “synthesized neo-British progressivism” – as Rolling Stone’s John Rockwell put it in 1976 – the reader could understand enough to know if the album was any good in the critic’s opinion and, thus, was worth buying.

Pre-Internet, reviews could make or break a new band, especially if they weren’t one of the lucky few bands their label decided to push on radio and with well-funded promotion. But that time is gone. Today, everyone is a critic because everyone has access.
Unlike movies, books, and theatre, all music is easily accessible to anyone with a computer, often before it has been officially released.

The one great advantage that critics once had over their readers has vanished.

Critics are often listening to an album at the same time as their readers because as soon as a promotional copy of the new Fleet Foxes album is sent out, it appears on Thepiratebay.org and every other torrent site. Within hours it is streaming on YouTube and by the next day it’s old news on the blogs.

The new universality of music hurts music criticism in two major ways. The first and most widely acknowledged consequence essentially boils down to, why the hell should I care what the critics think if I’ve already heard the album and developed my own opinion? Reading a review simply becomes a way to confirm this opinion. It’s no longer about learning what’s new and good, reading a review is about confirming your already established notions of what’s new and good.

It’s similar to current political thought. Do you think President Obama is a Kenyan socialist hell-bent on establishing Sharia law in Arkansas? Then you probably watch Fox News. Do you think Obama is the miraculous love child of Abraham Lincoln and Rosa Parks? Then you probably watch MSNBC. When you’ve already developed an opinion, challenging it can be a pain in the ass.

This point was proven by a study, entitled Does Chatter Matter? The Impact of User-Generated Content on Music Sales, by New York University professor Vasant Dhar. Dhar found that blog chatter, not by critics but by other fans, has a greater effect on an album’s sales than whether or not the album received favourable reviews. According to the study albums covered by over 200 blogs significantly increase in sales.

Dhar told the Toronto Star, “We expected that the views of the traditional media would count more. But in some cases, blogs were more important than media ratings. Basically, what that suggested is that when it comes to music, people tend to trust people with views similar to them more than [they do] the experts. People who are looking at the world in the same way as you [do] are becoming increasingly important.”

Luckily one magazine is acknowledging the new reality. Spin announced last month that it is phasing out its music review section and is instead starting a Twitter feed called @SpinReviews, meant to be more a conversation starter among music fans rather than an old fashion review.

The magazine explained in an announcement on Spin.com that “the standard music review, once presented as an imperious edict, has increasingly frayed into a redundant, gratuitous novelty in an era of fewer and fewer actual music consumers. Tight security on major-label albums (and practically no security on indie-label albums) often means you’re downloading a leaked album the same day as your favorite magazine or website. The value of the average rock critic’s opinion has plummeted now that a working knowledge of Google can get you high-quality audio of practically any record, so you can listen and decide for yourself whether it’s worth a damn.”

Secondly, in the race to hear everything the moment it comes out and be the first to review it, reviews themselves have become less reliable and thoughtful. Full appreciation of music requires multiple listens and some time to digest.

As a music fan, many albums I loved on first listen got old quickly and many of my favorite albums took time to grow on me. The new age of music criticism doesn’t allow for digestion. Bloggers are blogging and tweeters are tweeting the second they push play on iTunes. Reviews no longer have to be thought-out or well written, they simply have to exist, now, because that album will be old news by next week.

As Los Angeles Times music critic Ann Powers says, journalism and the music industry are “two fields hit extra hard by the web’s flattening effect on information flow. There’s also precious little authority of the old kind. Expert pronouncements and writerly pirouetting no longer pay any kind of rent.”

This isn’t to say that great reviews don’t exist anymore, I’ll occasionally come across a long-form review which really does make me give an album a second chance or listen to it in a new way. However, more and more reviews tell me nothing knew, flat-out irritate me, or fail to grab my attention at all.

Music criticism is obsolete. Music reviews no longer exist to educate, they exist for the sake of existing.