To Score or Not to Score

Grading albums on a numeric scale is now a staple of modern day music reviews, but it is far from a perfect system.

Written and iIllustrated by Mark Yoder

In today’s era of streaming, anyone with an internet connection and a phone has instant access to more songs than anyone could listen to in a lifetime. While this abundance of choice is remarkably convenient, it can also be overwhelming and difficult to navigate, making the process of curation very important for listeners. Competing services like Apple Music, Pandora, and Spotify are in a constant arms race of who can offer better features to help their listeners find songs that they love. Pandora and Spotify invest huge sums of money on these features, which include algorithms that assess your music taste and continually offer you tracks that align with your taste. But even these brilliantly designed features sometimes bore the listener by exclusively suggesting songs that snugly fit into the categories that are proven to be enjoyable to the listener, instead of offering something bold and new. 

This is where music reviews can be a very helpful resource. Instead of just taking a shot into the dark abyss of artists and songs, you can easily access articles by reviewers whose thoughts you can read on exciting new albums. Then, based on their assessment, you can decide to go listen for yourself. 

Unfortunately, these reviews come with their pitfalls as well. One of the fundamental issues with current music reviews is the widely prevalent practice of scoring albums on a numeric scale. Many reviewers and music publications choose to adopt this practice for a couple reasons. It makes it easy to quickly scan and gauge how positive the review is without reading the full review. Additionally, websites like Wikipedia and Metacritic are important sources of clicks for online publications, so it is imperative to score albums so that these sites can use them to link back to your page. And, it can build an entertaining anticipation as the points are doled out to a big release or album. 

While the scoring system has its benefits and is most likely not going anywhere in music reviewing, it is important to realize the many flaws of this system and take them with a grain of salt. The most glaring flaw with assigning a score to an album is its overt reductiveness. Albums’ many variables, such as the goal of the artist, the influencing genres, and the intended audience, make attempting to grade all albums on the exact same scale of  “good” or “bad” suspect. Album reviews can be interesting and provide lots of helpful insight by analyzing the elements of an album, but trying to boil all of this down into a single number takes away from the nuance of the review.

There are aspects of music that can be analyzed in a truly objective way, such as the technical proficiency of the artist and producers, but the majority of the evaluation of how “good'' an album is comes down to personal preference. The score that a reviewer or listener gives is just how much they personally liked it, because it is firmly rooted in that individual’s taste and bias. Many people find a reviewer that has tastes that seem to align with their personal tastes and use their scores and reviews as a quick way to find music they like. But it’s possible that a popular reviewer’s high score can influence the public’s opinions on an album. Artists like Kendrick Lamar and Radiohead are so highly esteemed amongst critics that going back to listen to their albums after reading the rave reviews would be accompanied by a subconscious pressure to enjoy them. 

Another issue that comes with scoring albums is that it often distracts from the content of the album — and, paradoxically, the content of the review.  Many people completely ignore the review and just look at the score so that they can angrily dispute it. The popular music publication Pitchfork has had many infamous reviews that mainly became controversial because of their scores being widely considered too high or too low. Another example of this phenomenon is Youtube music reviewer Anthony Fantano, who is known for his harsh scores and entertaining criticisms. Fantano’s fanbase is continually fixated on his scores, using them to create innumerable memes and troll his comment section. Although these scores are very entertaining for the audience, they also come at the cost of taking away focus from the music itself. 

Scores can also lead to a snobby mob mentality of using aggregate review scores to find out which albums are undisputedly “good.” The thought process is if someone does not personally enjoy these albums, then it must be because their musical palette is not developed enough. This type of holier-than-thou attitude is not a healthy way of listening to or talking about music. Use whatever you need to use to find music that you love, whether it be algorithmic curation tools or the recommendation of a trusted reviewer. Regardless of how you find it, turn up the volume and tune out the pointless arguments about what an album should or should not be scored.