Negative Reviews and Biased Commentary
While music journalists are known as critics, they are also viewed as guides for musical history, biographies, music personnel and new releases. However, these guides become pretentious, snobby and biased when focused on negative reviews, even the chief editor. They will give perfect ratings to certain albums, but will rip others to shreds, often for the smallest things. One album is praised for being inspired by a previous work, while the other is slammed for the same reason. The reason why I'm concerned about this is because rather than being informative, negative reviews are entirely opinion-based and only cater to the journalists' interests. They can also scare readers away from listening to something new, and pressure a musical act to retire early and fall into a deep depression. Additionally, even positive reviews are more opinion-based than informative, sometimes bordering on dog-eat-dog mentalities like on the AllMusic review for Throwing Muses' debut album. A suggested solution would be to make reviews educational and encyclopedic instead of making it all about the journalists' preferences and rants. If AllMusic wants to keep the rating system, they should focus more on uplifting artists than tearing them down for aspects out of their control. Remove ratings from and ignore albums that they dislike instead of creating unnecessary drama.