Album Rating: 3.0

Oh yeah Croatian Amor was p cool, should rejam that and catch up on Jaar for starters

Album Rating: 4.0 | Sound Off

"on average, things are rated way more highly here than on rym"



When it's a metal album yeah

Was gonna say Nic Jaar owned my 2020 tbh

>When it's a metal album yeah

no, quite literally in general / on average

things that gain traction organically in niches rarely have their bubbles burst on this site, you can see it just as clearly with 2000s post-rock (bands like caspian and pg.lost do not have a single album with >3.5 average on rym), post-hardcore, emo, pop punk, whatever other meme sputcore genres there are

thank you for bumping the thread though i completely forgot i was meant to respond to sowing will do so now

Album Rating: 4.0

I know you're kidding Colton but look at the backlash from our recent Taylor Swift and LDR reviews. Personal threats against staffers aside, they tried to get us canceled on metacritic. People were legitimately advocating that not scoring those albums higher was sexist and that we should be deplatformed.

People are idjits.

@sowing, johnny and anyone interested

i think most of what you've noticed is fundamentally rooted in the internet itself. i think as a society we failed to foresee all the subtle effects that quasi-unlimited convenient access to communication and information would have. traditional media and journalism are increasingly less relevant, and so are their revenue stream if they don't adapt. why buy a mag when you can read it online, and if you can't read it online you'll just find an alternative that you *can*

it also created an environment where suddenly anyone can broadcast their opinions and maybe have followers with similar views, which leads to the problem of fandoms and thus the rise of doxxing, death threats and so on. which also means more societal pressure to keep up with trends and have an opinion on everything, which has more people flocking over to rating sites and similar

now there's also a very real inflation in general, outside of critics, which is perfectly summarise by that one xkcd image you've probably seen... why that is exactly, im less sure... overwhelmed by information/content/possibilities -> don't want to waste time -> only care about "the best" things -> those giving the ratings have to adjust accordingly ... i wonder if things like user reviews on shopping sites and now mobile apps as well had an impact, my hunch is probably... i understand from a lot of discussions online that in the united states corporate world there is also an issue in some industries where clients can give feedback on the service workers they interacted with and "rate" them, and that anything less than 5 stars is seen by a lot of managers as failure... i'm sure there must be some underlying connection between all of these but it's not yet clear to me what it might be. im sure some would argue its just capitalism at work, seeking to "optimise" at the expense of all else, and maybe thats true

anyway, getting closer to the core of the issue again, the fact that music publications are struggling to keep any kind of relevance regardless of the skills of the writers and journalists they staff certainly gives them way less leverage over the industry they're supposed to report on and critique. if you give a now expected level of praise, the industry is happy to keep you as a lap dog, and if you don't then you might not even get early press access to releases/information, thus making you even less relevant... not to mention sicking a lot of butthurt fanboys on your arse regardless of how accurate and relevant your criticism might have been. we've seen stuff like this happen a lot lately with tv, film and especially video games

@colton

good points, forgot to mention anything on that... the extremes are mentally ill but i think the way the culture and internet are set up right now encourages more of the "average" person to tend ever so slightly towards that... people really, really do not understand how opinions work, how critique works, the dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity and how and where they apply, and the internet itself is currently facilitating a great big mess as a result of all that

@americanflagash

just to drive the point home, if you look at sput's all-time charts you will find the top 200 albums are rated between 4.37 and 4.64, excluding lives and compilations (oddities like nujabes' compilations for instance are also super highly rated)

if you look at RYM's top albums of all time, only the highest of them is a 4.37, and only 4 of them are in the 4.30-4.37 range

in general, albums with a 3.9-4.3 average on sput will have a 3.5-3.8 on rym

recent and popular non-metal albums:
rtj4 has 4.08 on sput vs 3.71 on rym
program music 3 has 4.07 on sput vs 3.71 on rym
that bruit album has 4.24 on sput vs 3.65 on rym
the latest nick cave has 3.91 on sput vs 3.55 on rym

Who needs reviews anymore when reaction channels can praise every band in existence, and grift every fanbase by telling them exactly what they want to hear.

i think this started way before reaction channels tbh but im largely with you

JAZZ DRUMMER REACTS TO DEATH METAL

MUSIC THEORY MAJOR REACTS TO HAKEN

ATHEISTS REACT TO MEWITHOUTYOU

BLACK WOMAN REACTS TO YNDI HALDA

>BLACK WOMAN REACTS TO YNDI HALDA

no one will get this reference :[

also rip the discourse on the last page

>People by and large hopefully understand that there's a lot more nuance when you're talking about art

they... they kinda dont in my experience... or maybe if you quizzed them on the topic they would give you sensible answers in a vacuum, but in actual conversation especially online a lot of people cant fucking handle or even comprehend different opinions for shit

>I do worry that the notion that a reviewer isn't fit to review certain albums will continue becoming more prevalent.

its always been prevalent in less idpol ways though, "if you're not a fan of [genre] why review it, you obviously dont get what the appeal is supposed to be" is nothing new and can be seen surrounding other media as well

>at the very least it'll get to a point where people don't wanna review certain albums honestly because the backlash is so intense and it's not like there's a huge paycheck there to compensate for that. So people will either lie about their opinions on albums to appease people, or they just won't become reviewers at all

going to go out on a limb and say this probably already happens

>then you'll have people who are the opposite of that and they very much want to shit on every album under the sun, but a lot of the time their writing will come across as very pretentious and intentionally inflammatory, so it's almost like the same issue but in reverse lol

eehhh... stuff like that is posted because butthurt generates traffic... no one legitimately wants to shit on every album under the sun

also honestly theres not that many pretentious, intentionally inflammatory articles anyway... ive seen a lot of articles described that way which just kinda ... try to raise points that a lot of the people its aimed at are uncomfortable with admitting/thinking about sometimes

This is how Colton dresses when his Dad comes home too

>Maybe I'm letting some of the awful "reviews" on rym cloud my judgement regarding how common that actually is.

they're all user reviews afaik, they dont technically have writing staff like sput does... im pretty sure, but not 100%

i would argue the opposite, that most people would instead feel some pressure not to score it too low :]

one thing you see even on sput is people giving a 4 or 4.5 to something that they themselves admit they dont get that much out of but they think its too important not to rate it that highly... which kind of defeats the purpose of having and expressing an opinion in the first place?

>idk if people outside of the public eye really feel that pressure

again ive seen users here do that as well not just staff

>and yeah that's stupid because then you begin sorta indirectly implying that your scores are objective in some way

precisely, like i said there's a lot of fundamental misunderstandings out there