Music & Movie Ratings: Causing Chaos One Decimal at a Time
It is now ‘normal’ to immediately rate music and movies, but should this be the case?
In an attempt to escape the binary trap of dishing out a “yay or nay,” we’ve developed into a society obsessed with meticulously listing, ranking and tiering every piece of media we consume. Even if you’re not the type to keep a categorised record of the books and movies you’ve indulged in throughout the year, we all have a media critic deep down inside of us.
Walking out of the cinema, it is common practice to reduce a flurry of thoughts to a quick, representative number. It’s harmless fun to ask your mate to rate Oppenheimer out of ten or to give the most recent Canta issue five stars out of five. “Put a number to it,” we say, innocuously gauging opinions. Sure, it’s not the most comprehensive way of showing how much you liked (or despised) what you saw but it’s enough to get the ball rolling in a conversation, if necessary, or to show which side of the spectrum you’re leaning.
With the rise of websites like Rate Your Music and Letterboxd, which I recently learnt was founded by Kiwis, anyone can be a critic and publish their thoughts, ratings and recommendations for the world to see. Yearning to be a content creator is nothing new, especially in an age where being a YouTuber is a bona fide and common career aspiration for the upcoming iPad kid generation.
Let’s ditch talking about the actual content part of writing reviews and key in on just the rating aspect, as the concept of assigning number ratings is causing a slight stir in the muso community. Plenty of big media companies draw most of their attention and spur most of their engagement through their rating systems, such as Pitchfork’s ten-point scale. While their reviews come with a 600-1000 word write-up on the album, I think it’s fair to say that the majority of readers skip straight to the overall rating out of sheer curiosity and impatience. Don’t worry, I tend to do that too. The issue with this though is that the online conversation becomes centred around the rating rather than the review. We see this repeatedly, especially when mainstream artists drop.
Some Pitchfork ratings can look equally as ludicrous on paper as in practice, such as Peppa Pig’s Adventures, which despite being written with a tongue-in-cheek tone, still received a 6.5 rating. That is higher than The Stroke’s The New Abnormal or Daft Punk’s Discovery. For the most part, many otherwise run-of-the-mill ratings tend to lead to unnecessarily reductive conversations and aired frustrations. While a rating is a shortcut to or summary of the writer’s opinion, a fixed number removes all nuances from their listening experience, which trickles down into the subsequent discourse about it in the comments.
Earlier this year, Rolling Stone abandoned ratings in their reviews. The following is their official statement on why: “You may have noticed that we got rid of the stars on our album reviews. If you're an engaged music fan in 2023, your opinion isn't going to be defined by some random number. Now, we tell you right away (with some new labels) when a new album is recommended (hear this!) or, in rarer cases, an instant classic.” I’m a fan of their new classification system as it discards the opportunity for readers to pit individual reviews against each other but still provides some direction of whether they’d recommend it or not without dominating the write-up.
In high school, an old classmate of mine dropped a shred of year eleven wisdom on us as he observed a friend watching a gaming video on YouTube. He asked, “Why are you watching that? Wouldn’t you rather just play it yourself?” Quite the profound thought from our contemporary Plato, but I digress. In a tangential way, this school of thought can be applied to reviews of music, movies, and other types of art or media. Why read reviews about music when you can listen to it yourself?
Many do love reading about other people’s listening experiences, so the appeal lies outside of the music itself. Even though Quora answers aren’t exactly on par with a thirty-year-old, peer-reviewed journal article shrouded in digital dust, one I stumbled across succinctly summed up why music reviews resonate with so many people. Funnily enough, it came from a Rate Your Music staff member who described reviews as a “rather personal affair,” stating that “it doesn’t hurt to learn more about the writer’s wider life or preferences in the process [of reading].” Sure, it’s enjoyable to read a piece that is well-informed with contextual knowledge of the artist and genre, but it is clear that many music lovers take great joy in understanding others’ processes and interpretations.
At the end of the day, our musical tastes are a mosaic of cultural reference points, interpersonal influences, and a lifetime of experiences. There is a charm to understanding how two people can share a love for the artistry of a song for entirely diametric reasons. So, why not cast the ratings to the side, read up on your favourite new songs and albums, and listen with a new perspective.
