News
Report: 80% of people don't care what we have to say
Disturbing news for us at Prefix today: despite our reviews section still going strong, it's becoming increasingly irrelevant. A Trust Index survey found that 4 out of every 5 music listeners are "turning away" from professional music reviews and turning to online recommendation services like Pandora, last.fm, and iLike.
While you can fully expect the mainstream music press to go apeshit over the study, we're a bit more optimitic. First, "turning away" is an exceedingly ambiguous phrasing, and doesn't mean that 80% of music fans have stopped reading reviews. Secondly, while musical tastes are more overtly subjective than for other media, there'll still always be a market for expert opinion.
While the sky may not be falling, it should also mark a significant shift in how music is criticized by the media. That's why we let you, dear Prefix readers, rank albums along with our own critics. If you have any more suggestions on how to make Prefix's music rating system better, make sure to let us know. [Hypebot]
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I wish the readers/users would rate the albums more. I like seeing what other people think of the albums we cover.
I've always noticed is that people really like to say that they dislike professional criticism, even if they really feel differently. In mag focus groups, reviews sections consistently rate the highest in what people dig. We're sheep and we love service elements. That said, I don't think magazines really need review sections anymore. :-p
joydivided
Crap. I think I deleted a comment on this post by mistake. Sorry out there.
Newspapers seem convinced that reviews are either a degraded form or lose readers when they get too abstract or grandiose. When I think "professional reviewer" I think of someone like Aidin Vaziri--i.e., your local, snarky music reviewer that flatters and apologizes for middlebrow taste and never makes anyone feel dumb. Which is fine, but there's a whole other class of "semi-pro" or amateur music writers that are somewhere between pro (the music writers with a well-defined constituency, like a newspaper's readership) and the more fluid organization of social networking utilities, and their ranks are growing.
I think people are more concerned now with assaulting critics for not liking stuff that they like than actually reading something about a band that they have no idea about. It seems the average Joe really looks towards record reviews as an affirmer of their tastes in music more than anything else.
When I was the A&E editor for my college newspaper, I got 75 e-mails once about how dumb I was for not liking the Killers (I think I gave their rarities comp Sawdust like two stars), including one guy who tracked me down at the office to tell me I was an a**hole.
But when I reviewed records by Born Ruffians, No Age, Cadence Weapon, etc. people would e-mail me and say I only wrote reviews about bands no one had ever heard of.
80% of People are sheep who just buy what MTV and their friends tell them to. The other 20% are the people who actually amount to something. Hasn't it always been like this?
Well I still get a sh!t load of people reading my reviews over at www.juslikemusic.com