Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Albums

Requested move at Talk:See You Up There#Requested move 25 February 2024

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:See You Up There#Requested move 25 February 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. – robertsky (talk) 14:15, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

"Received critical acclaim"

Hello everyone, it's been a while... various family issues meant I had to put all non-essential stuff on hold for most of 2023, including Wikipedia. Anyway, I've been thinking over a couple of things while I've been away, and one of them is the critical reception section in album articles. Many articles start this section with the sentence "The album received critical acclaim." But how useful is this statement? The truth of the matter is that the days when an album would get an absolute pasting (in the UK at least) in NME or Melody Maker are long gone, and it's tough nowadays to find a review for any album in any genre that is less than 6/10. The nature of journalism these days means that nobody wants to be over-critical of any record, resulting in bland reviews and high scores.

I had a look at the aggregate scores in Metacritic since 2020. From 2020 to 2023, there were a total of 1533 albums included. The number of albums that scored lower than the score needed for "general acclaim" is only 25, and only two scored lower than 50%. Most of us would consider an average rating of 70% or 7/10 to be a pretty solid rating, and 1413 albums achieved this, i.e. more than 92% of all the albums included on Metacritic so far this decade. So saying that an album received "critical acclaim" seems a pretty meaningless statement to me, as virtually all of them are acclaimed.

I can understand including the comment as part of the Metacritic rating, e.g. "The album has a rating of 67% on Metacritic, indicating 'general acclaim' on the website", because this is at least a verifiable statement. But is there any point in starting the section with such an OR statement, when it has almost no worth? And should we remove this opening statement from any album articles that include it? If an album is notable enough to have a Wikipedia article, it was probably notable enough to receive good album reviews. In fact, it would be far more notable to mention the poor ratings of the 25 albums that dipped below the 60% score, as they are far rarer, or the ones that score 80%+ and receive "universal acclaim" on Metacritic. Richard3120 (talk) 01:06, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

Glad to see you back! What you're talking about is a problem in the video game world too. Realistically, outside of the rare complete abomination, receptions tend to scale from "critical acclaim" to "positive" to "mixed", on a scale of 6/10 to 10/10. I think a lot of the problem is modern reviewers working on such a scale and forcing us to use it to because of how Wikipedia functions. I do remove unattributed claims of "acclaim", but Metacritic and other aggregators use the term pretty liberally, so it's not like it cuts it down all that much... Sergecross73 msg me 01:27, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

Hey, yeah, glad to hear from you, hope things are better. Yeah, Kelefa Sanneh mentioned this in Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres, that popular music is the "most positively" reviewed of the popular arts--partly because one has to go out of one's way to produce a technically poor-sounding album. "Lo-fi", like "rockabilly", for example, has been just an aesthetic choice for a while, not the result of finances or equipment. Caro7200 (talk) 12:37, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

I definitely see this as a problem. "critical acclaim" is a ubiquitous phrase on Wikipedia articles about the arts, and I see it as symptom of the generally poor standard of writing about critical reception on Wikipedia.

WP:FILM has a guideline on this, MOS:ACCLAIMED, that we could adopt: Describing a film with superlatives such as "critically acclaimed" or "box-office bomb" is loaded language and an exceptional claim that must be attributed to multiple high-quality sources. Be wary of news headlines, which are not reliable sources, that may contain exaggerated or sensationalized claims not supported by the body of the source. (There's more at the link.) Popcornfud (talk) 12:49, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

I also think this is a problem. I agree that there needs to be some form of guideline similar to WP:FILM for how this is handled. I work with many older albums and I've conveniently had quite a lot of sources that explicitly say "X album received positive reviews on release" and "X album received mixed-to-positive reviews", or even "the most well-received album since Y album". Although Metacritic certainly helps for recent albums, I think there should be a standard set where an album received specific types of reviews should be sourced, especially "acclaimed" ones. – zmbro _{(talk) (cont)} 17:07, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

@Zmbro: I hate the terms "mixed to positive" or "mixed to negative"... I know I'm being picky and it's probably the EFL teacher in me that's getting annoyed, but "mixed" means "both positive and negative" so it's tautological as far as I'm concerned... it should be "mostly positive" or "mostly negative" if one needs to lean one way or the other. And yes, I'm going to add some detail to Audio Vertigo which says that many critics called it the band's "best album in years", but I can literally source those quotes. Richard3120 (talk) 19:02, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

"mixed to positive/negative" is definitely on my copyediting shitlist. It's not just syntactically confused, it's also weaselly, inevitably mostly used to flatter something that didn't get great reviews. The consensus has generally been against it when I've seen it discussed. There are a few discussions in the WP:FILM archives, I haven't checked other places. Popcornfud (talk) 19:03, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

@Popcornfud: "it's also weaselly, inevitably mostly used to flatter something that didn't get great reviews"... 100% agree with you. Richard3120 (talk) 19:08, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

One difference between albums and films is that there are a slew of albums and individual tracks released constantly (as I recall, some 120,000 songs are uploaded to various streaming services a day), whereas the effort and budget required to make even a simple film is orders of magnitude greater than an album, so review outlets will generally not bother with an album that is a 4/10 (why would they?), but if there are three films opening on a weekend, they will generally put forth the effort to tell readers if they are worth watching. (Additionally, it is pretty trivial to hear new music for free or at no additional cost if you have one of a number of streaming subscriptions, but going to the movies costs $20+.) So you will have a lot of films that actually have middling or lo scores, but it's pretty rare to have many albums that are reviewed broadly and are less than at least a 3/5 stars or something. Still, it is necessary to state in the lead what is in the rest of the article and not characterizing the reception would be inadequate. ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 22:18, 14 April 2024 (UTC)

I usually just go with something like "generally positive/negative reviews" as an introductory/topic sentence, since there's usually not an RS that analyzes all of an album's reviews and determines whether they're positive or negative. voorts (talk/contributions) 21:44, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

It just seems a bit pointless to me, because as I said, every single album gets "generally positive" reviews these days, so we're putting an identical introduction to every album article. Richard3120 (talk) 23:07, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

Wikidata equivalent project

Heads up that I've been meaning to make this for a while and finally did today: d:Wikidata:WikiProject Albums. Anyone who is interested in structured data about albums, please do join and help bring best practices and complete data to our sister project. ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 22:13, 14 April 2024 (UTC)