experts agree?
March 19, 2010 5:02 PM   Subscribe

Is there a site for music like "Rotten Tomatoes?

I'd like to find a compilation of critical opinion online for popular music; I don't mean like Pitchfork; I don't mean one of those "100 albums you have to hear before you die" things; I mean like "Rotten Tomatoes", only for music.
posted by acrasis to Media & Arts (12 answers total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
Maybe allmusic.com, although they only have one review per album I think.
posted by Dick Laurent is Dead at 5:06 PM on March 19, 2010


Metacritic is what you're looking for.
posted by TheNewWazoo at 5:10 PM on March 19, 2010 [2 favorites]


Metacritic does music.
posted by octothorpe at 5:10 PM on March 19, 2010 [1 favorite]


Darn.
posted by octothorpe at 5:12 PM on March 19, 2010


TheNewWazoo is correct.

Metacritic is just like Rotten Tomatoes but with music (and other things) in addition to movies.

They also have some really useful lists, e.g. upcoming albums.
posted by Jaltcoh at 5:14 PM on March 19, 2010


Check some of the other sources here. Metacritic is the first place I thought of, but I don't think it's as thorough as Rotten Tomatoes.
posted by lukemeister at 5:48 PM on March 19, 2010


cavaet: Metacritic is not, repeat NOT comprehensive and completely misses (ie, doesn't even list) many older and smaller albums. and in the way of a reality check, the highest scoring album of all time on metacritic is by brian wilson! eegads!! no, i'm not gonna gonna slam the guy, but i think his status the "the" best would be debated by quite a few folks.

for me, the most useful music review source continues to be...drum roll, please ----> wikipedia!

wikipedia is pretty up to date with new material and most album pages will link you to a goodly list of "top" shelf reviews.

that's my take on it anyway

.
posted by DavidandConquer at 6:04 PM on March 19, 2010


cavaet: Metacritic is not, repeat NOT comprehensive and completely misses (ie, doesn't even list) many older and smaller albums. and in the way of a reality check, the highest scoring album of all time on metacritic is by brian wilson! eegads!!

Metacritic is only for recent music (and movies, and TV). All it does (like Rotten Tomatoes) is collate all the external reviews it can find into a single comprehensive score; it has no editorial opinion of its own.

And, like it or not, Smile is indeed one of the most critically-acclaimed albums of the last decade.
posted by dfan at 6:49 PM on March 19, 2010


And, like it or not, Smile is indeed one of the most critically-acclaimed albums of the last decade


i'm not picking on you, but you inspired me to at least take a quick look @ metacritic's scores for this album. even at my brief glance, i found at least two inconsistencies that cause metacritis to score this album higher than the "critics" might like them to...

specifically, metacritic credits pitchfork and amazon.com with scores of 100 and 100. however, if you take the time to look at those websites you see that pitchfork gives the album a 9 out of 10 (link here: http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8781-smile/) and amazon has smile @ 4 out of 5 stars (ie, 80%). now the amazon score might have changed over time, but the PF score is solid.

so, at present, at least 2 of metacritic's "100's" for Smile should relegated to a 90 and a 80 respectively.

and, since this was just a random sampling, i'd expect there to be other such errors.

so, to restate the point i made earlier: as nice as it might seem, metacritic is neither thorough nor comprehensive.
posted by DavidandConquer at 7:59 PM on March 19, 2010


RateYourMusic is pretty good for this sort of thing.
posted by Sys Rq at 8:02 PM on March 19, 2010


I apologize to everyone, especially the OP, for having a case of Someone Is Wrong On The Internet, but
- Metacritic scores Pitchfork's 9.0 review of Smile with 90, not 100.
- The Amazon score of 100 refers to the editorial review (you can see that they quote from it), not the customer reviews.
posted by dfan at 8:43 PM on March 19, 2010


Response by poster: Thanks, people! I'll hasten to Metacritic. For what it's worth, I *really* liked "Smile".
posted by acrasis at 6:53 AM on March 20, 2010


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