Wednesday, July 1, 2015

Curation vs Criticism in the Streaming Era

Back when the only way to find out if you liked an album was to either buy it, listen to in the store (if they even let you) or hear a song on the radio, traditional music criticism served a purpose. It still had problems, and even if it was just some random newspaper's ignorant opinion it still had some weight to it, acting as a flimsy meatshield between the ocean of garbage music and your hard-won money.

Nowadays, though, none of us have to suffer those critics any longer. Regardless of the "score" the record gets you can just listen and decide for yourself, obviously making traditional reviews seem kind of superfluous. Unfortunately, the increased ease of both accessing and creating music has resulted in an increase of the amount of shitty music that exists -- and the shitty music is just as easy to find as the good stuff.

It'll be interesting to see if criticism shifts to more of a "curation" model, kind of a "if you like X, you'll love Y!" type of thing, or if the division of communities stay similar to how they are now as a bunch of walled gardens and the old "objective" standards of critical writing are continuously propagated.  

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