Don't know if anyone else here has noticed this but there seems to be nearly thirty (assumingly low) ratings for this album already. Normally I'm not bothered by low user ratings but this one is still weeks away from public release. Either there's a lot of angry professional reviewers with pre-release copies out there wanting to show their disgust, or someone is abusing AllMusic's user voting system. Is it worth taking a look at it?
Users ratings average 2 stars lower than Neil Z. Yeung's rating. The largest ratings gap for their other albums was 0.5 star.
User reviews support the low user ratings. Garn Atiwat has withheld formally rating the album, and I think that user review is enlightening about similar users who didn't withhold low ratings based on an incomplete listen.
We did take a look at the users who have rated this album and couldn't see anything unusual. They each have unique email addresses and most of them have been active users over a decent span of time. The ratings have come in over a normal-seeming span of time as well, so it wasn't like they all appeared in one day (indicating spammy activity in one swoop).
We also looked into the rating activity of a handful of the users who have rated this album and they seem to have a normal swing of some positive ratings (a smattering of 5 stars) and some less-enthusiastic ones (one star or half-star ratings).
The only thing that feels unique about this case is that the album has been listed on the site for a long time before the release, so possibly these users were giving a low rating to an album they were unfamiliar with?
You're not wrong, it does feel odd, but from what we see, nothing nefarious jumps out at us.
Thanks for looking into it. It's surprising that the votes were varied. The overall user rating seemed to suggest otherwise. Even after the album's release, its been slow to rise.
It's all feels odd because many users were rating an album they were very unlikely to have heard.
Looking over some of the other entries, it seems to particarly happen to some of the albums that get pictured in the "upcoming releases" section.
There's probably no easy way to deal with it. Putting the album entries up only on release day would be too much work for the staff and blocking users from rating unreleased records would be very restrictive/tricky to impliment. It's just unfortunate that some users take advantage of the current system.
