New trend in album reviews?

I don't participate in forum discussions very much (well, in fact I hardly do). but there is one thing I've noticed recently that disturbs me a bit. What I observe is growing number of reviews in PA that include album rating calculated as the average of song ratings. That is an utter nonsense in my opinion. Is an album just a sum of its songs? No way, especially in progressive rock where albums are very often meant to be a musical concept and have much more meaning than just a bunch of songs recorded on one CD.
My point is that we shouldn't take such a "scientific" approach when talking about music. It leads nowhere - just think about it. If you start to calculate overall rating as the arithmetic mean of song ratings than why not the geometric mean or maybe harmonic? And why the hell should the 1-minute song be treated just like the 20-minute one? Take the weighted mean with song lengths as the weights - then you will get more accurate general rating! As you can see this way of thinking leads to more and more complicated but completely useless ideas.
I suggest we should stop thinking about ratings in terms of numbers as it involves too many false assumptions one may make when for example comparing two album ratings. Of course we can start a new discussion about improving the rating system, but it would be probably pointless. I believe it would be much more resonable to encourage people to treat ratings as categories not numbers. My idea would be to replace the stars reviewers give to each album with just one star but of different colours, for example bronze, silver, gold, platinum.. or something like that. Of course they would still have the same numeric meaning for purposes of average ratings, but maybe people wouldn't be so tempted to calculate the ratings. For example one may suppose that 5-star album is as better than 4-star album as 4-star album is better than 3-star album which is simply false. With a single star you can just say that platinum-star album is better than gold-star album which is better than silver-star one which is true or at least much closer to the truth than the former statement.
I'd like to hear what do you think about the whole thing.


Edited by kokoryn

That's an interesting point kokoryn. I started for about a half year to rate songs with points (from zero - 10 points) and count them together and take the difference out of it. It's something like a trend that many people do something similar now. Well, concept albums, or records where the songs only work together, I rate with a whole record rating. I don't only use the points to get somehow a rating for the record, but I try to make up my mind how many stars I would give a record before I start to write a review, without getting nearer to the songs in particular. The solution can be very different sometimes. For me it started as something like an experiment, but it simply doesn't work with all records. You need a good ear to figure out these ones, where you only can rate the whole album, without particular song ratings. If you can handle it, it's a good thing, if not, it's even not. To give the song star-ratings (1-5) makes non-sence IMHO, but if you give points from 0 - 10 or even more, it works. You only must know, how to rate.

I think that it makes much sense to comment on each songs specifically, but I would not try to rate them.

album reviews are only personal opinions

I agree with the original point. Reading those type of reviews though, I often get the impression the reviewers manipulate their track ratings to arrive at the album rating they want!

It is a bit of a waste of space though, like showing your working in an exam.

I'm not inclined to do that Cobb. We have to trust people to arrive at the rating they think is appropriate by whatever means they chose. The guidelines are there to help them, but at the end of the day, it's the reviewer's call.

I think that reviewing is a very personal thing, and different reviewers take different approaches... sometimes from one review to another.

If I don't like a reviewer's style, I may not bother reading the review - but I'm not going to waste my time getting annoyed about it unless it's offensive to the band, this site or its members.

In the latter cases I'll just flag it with Easy in the "Abuse" thread to get it booted off