The spammer reviewer must be stopped
An Open Letter to the Editors of AllMusic
Dear AllMusic team,
I’ve been with you since the All Music Guide first appeared on the Web in the mid-1990s, not long after Michael Erlewine’s Gopher archive became a fully fledged website.
Your liner-note rigour taught me how to listen, and since 1999 I’ve written a few hundred long-form reviews myself. Even when I demolished Cher’s Believe, I spelled out why—because an artist deserves at least that much respect.
That respect is exactly what’s missing from huge swathes of the current user-review feed. One profile—Simone Appolloni—now shows 60 015 reviews spanning 82 636 albums. pril 2025 reveals ten fresh reviews stamped the very same day. A couple run several paragraphs; most are drive-by blurbs such as “One of their releases.” Many are shorter than a tweet, yet they sail straight through your 50-character filter.
Why the arithmetic smells wrong
- One single, front-to-back spin of each album (45 minutes on average) equals 45 000 listening hours—more than five solid years without sleep.
- Spread across ten active years that’s roughly twelve hours of music every single day, before a word is typed.
- Serious critics usually listen twice or thrice, pushing the workload past the hours in a day.
How IMDb handles the same problem
IMDb isn’t perfect, but it does one thing right: it sets the minimum length for a user review at 600 characters—about 100 words—and rejects junk padding outright.
That rule forces writers to articulate at least one coherent idea. AllMusic’s 50-character minimum (barely half a sentence) invites the opposite.
A simple request
Please match IMDb’s standard—raise the floor to 600 characters. Here’s what else would help:
- Re-enable strict character counting at the point of submission and block anything shorter.
- Cap daily output from any one account—say, twenty-five reviews unless a moderator approves more.
- Show transparency badges (average review length, star curve) so readers can weigh credibility at a glance.
- Let three “not helpful” flags hide a review until staff can check it.
- Spotlight depth, not speed—feature one exemplary community review on the front page each week.
Why it matters
Unfiltered, low-effort ratings drag catalogue scores down, mislead casual listeners and bury thoughtful voices. Artists see their life’s work distorted by a single hyper-active account; readers meet skewed averages; and a site celebrated for three decades of scholarship risks sounding careless.
Page-view metrics are oxygen, but credibility is your lifeblood. If every album is a labour of love, every review should at least listen long enough to love—or dislike—with reasons. Matching IMDb’s 600-character rule is the quickest way to put quality back in the driver’s seat.
I’ve recommended AllMusic for almost thirty years. I’d like to keep doing so—with pride.
With appreciation, and hope for a small policy remix.
