Music vs Movies

On Tuesday, I tweeted that, on the website Metacritic, the average film score is 52 and the average music score for an album is 70.

This is probably not surprising to anyone that actually visits Metacritic. If you spend any time on the site, you see that there are so many albums that come out that seem “great” by the standards of critics. Whereas, for film the critics are much tougher and much more skeptical and it’s simply far less frequent that a film gets a great grade.

So why is this?

There are many possibilities.

One possibility is that Metacritic has a bunch of hacks in the music department or film department respectively and it’s grading system is all out of whack for either film or music. I doubt this is true.

Another possibility is that there is so much music that, when it gets reviewed at all, its much more likely to get a high score. Thus, the act of reviewing an album is itself a positive declaration and the likelihood that any review will therefore be negative is correspondingly low.

Which is another way of saying that there’s a lot of good music out there. So much, in fact, that the act of selecting a piece of good music from the metaphorical pile is almost arbitrary.

And the reason there’s a lot of good music out there is because, fundamentally, popular music is neither terribly difficult nor terribly expensive to create. Even the stuff we all say is “crap” is better than the crap that we consume through other media.

Music is not a comprehensive art form. It engages a very specific set of senses. And it has a specific set of parameters. Namely, I-IV-V chordal relationships that define a lot of how we listen to and process popular music. And those relationships are in place because, frankly, they sound good. They’re pleasing.

So the reason that music scores are, on average, higher, is because:

a) it’s easier to make good music therefore
b) there is a lot more of it therefore
c) on average, it will “score” better

Which is another way of saying it’s easy to make good music. Not rocket science I guess.

What’s the implication? It means that “good” music is essentially a commodity. There is no economic profit in it. No specific unique set of competitive differentiators to exploit. It’s interchangeable.

So, that means that any business model built on plucking “great” songs out of the ether from merely “good” songs is doomed to failure (Music Xray for example) and it will fail only because finding “great” songs isn’t actually a problem that anyone has, since there’s an abundance of them.

It also means that there’s no percentage in being an artist or creating music because, again, there is a surfeit of good music out there already. You’ll, by definition, be in the long tail. Getting into the music making business is like starting a lemonade business. Or maybe it’s like getting into the oil business if the cost of oil was free.

guymisterioso

So perhaps we should shift the curve on music. Therefore a 72 would be merely average music and 85 would be good and 92 and above is great. Makes sense to me. Might be easier to make "pleasing" music but that doesn't make it good. Just means it's less offensive. But I agree with your point about just the act of reviewing something means it struck the reviewer at some level.
theflyingchange

I guess it depends how you define "good". I actually think it is easier to
make good music. The thing that attracts me to music, that I need to make
it good, is emotional honesty. The rest can be pretty simple. And I find
that often. Lots of angst ridden dudes with their hearts to spill.
Page 7

I noticed this too. But I believe you're right in that there is just so many new albums out than new movies; it requires a lot more work and money to make a film versus a record. So since there is so much music out there, reviewers need to be selective in what they review thus they usually pick "good" music. Films on the other hand only release 3-5 every few weeks so it is easier to review all of them, and many are bad. I think it is easier to make music these days than 10, 20, 30 years ago; anyone with a laptop running Reason and Pro Tools and a MIDI controller can make professionally sounding music and sell their album on iTunes. That would've been unheard of in 1987. I'm sure there is also a lot of bad music out there, but we have so many tools to sift through that we don't discover it as much.