So the purpose of a review is to give consumers a good idea of whether something is worth buying right? I'm ranting again.

1. What are you reviewing in a song? "The lyrics are great", "the melody is catchy", "the vocals are awesome". What do these even mean? On any particular day your mood can change and your circumstances might be different, so your musical preferences can change all the time. I don't get how you even criticize music then. Anything can sound good based on your mood and what's happening in your life. If you're heartbroken, you want heartbreak songs. If you're driving, you want country or rock or whatever. So how can something be rated badly? Because the vocalist is old? How do you really say one song's lyrics are better than another? Doesn't it depend solely on your current feelings?

2. Thus,  that's why almost everything on metacritic's music reviews section is green (universal appeal). I find it to be totally stupid. What's the point of music reviews if they're all "good"? How can music be bad anyway (except for music that's made intentionally bad as a parody)? If everything is good, how can I differentiate on what to buy? Scroll through the music section. 99/100 albums are green!

3. So if almost nothing is bad, why pay these pretentious hippies good money to drone on about how "transcendent" and "overwhelming" a song is? It seems that they get their paychecks based on how much hyperbole they can put in their reviews and it doesn't matter how often they say it. Sometimes the words used are totally blanket statements that have nothing to do with the song.

For example: Production-wise, the album sounds amazing, every multilayered arrangement and synth tone calibrated for maximum headphone-listening pleasure. ... Reznor is still making records that crackle with restless energy.

-boston globe about "bad witch"

What does this crap even mean? It's like the reviewer just mixed and matched a bunch of big words together to sound smart.

I love listening to music but the review system is totally pointless. Get rid of it.

I don't think music fans pay attention to what critics say compared to movie fans or gamers, it seems like people just listen to what mood they are in like you stated.

Yes! So get rid of it! Stop paying these sycophants who do nothing useful!

I was reading a rewiew of one of XXXTentation's albums and I wondered the same thing. Beyond the quality of the critiques, there are these phrases thrown around that I don't think even people literate in music could tell what they're supossed to mean.

What kind of stuff make the reviews of other media to work (sort of), however? Well, people tend to analyze structures and debate whether or not each individual component works and communicates what the creator originally intended. Critiquing the quality of these components in music must be really hard as all of them, with the exception of vocals, are purely sonorous. And it's not surprising, I think. When people are put to describe things with their senses, a lot really struggle when they're put to come up with adjectives that describe the sonorous and olfactory qualities of an object.

There's a big difference with movie and game reviews. With those, there are actual parts that can be critiqued individually. For example, with a game, you can pinpoint low res textures, silly AI behavior, sloppy controls, etc. There are actual things to critique that people can experience.

But with music, there's nothing to really fixate on. There's just how you feel about the sound. That's all there is.

I'm not sure why anybody reads music reviews. It doesn't take a lot of time to listen to an album or a few songs on YouTube.

Music critics are less than useless. One of my favorite albums of all time growing up was Starship's "Knee Deep In the Hoopla", which featured the smash #1 hit "We Built This City" that today is regarded by self-absorbed music snobs the world over as one of the worst songs of all time. Why? Because they said so, that's why! Just do a quick google search for the song and it'll turn up tons of articles stating just that.

Doesn't matter the fact that the song is catchy as all hell and rivals A-Ha's "Take On Me" as one of the most memorable and decade-defining pop songs of the 80s. Nope, we're all supposed to hate it because the powers-that-be do. Something about the group "selling out" or "going mainstream" or some other BS... never mind the fact that Starship's sound and direction in the 80s was no different than that of tons of other artists and bands that first got big in the 60s / 70s and then reinvented themselves in the 80s.

The only time music critics were ever right is when they universally trashed Metallica's "St. Anger", because it deserved to be trashed.

I disagree. There's plenty to focus on eg:

- quality of production/mix

- song structures, tempos and dynamics (in relation to individual songs and the album as a whole)

- how well an album flows, if it's too short/long, are there any lulls

- lyrical themes

- quality of individual performances

- how the music relates to an artist's catalogue and the current scene, if there's any growth or evolution in their sound

No, the purpose of reviews shold be the give an insight of why and to what degree the opera is intersting for the reviewer given his backgrounds and his expectations on the opera. Preferably the author should have a good understanding of medium and of the interested artistic movement.

If the opera is "worth buying" only depends on yourself.

And the yes the review system of giving scores form 1 to 10 and then make an average out of them is completely pointless, the sooner you realise the better.

In other words, does it sound good? Don't sugarcoat. All the stuff you said just means the same thing.