Critics

Synopsis: Critics follow patterns

Everybody's a critic, goes the line. Well, me too. I follow critic sites quite a bit, and while critics often vary broadly in their reactions to media, they also follow some general trends.

From Pitchfork.com comes the following explanation of critic trends:

"If you're one of those poor souls who while away the day job by keeping a scorecard of music review sites, there's one thing you already know: There are two distinct groups of bad albums. The more prevalent kind is the fodder that fills a critic's mailbox, bands with awkward names and laser-printed cover art that don't inspire ire so much as pity. The second group is more treacherous: Bands that yield high expectations due to past achievements, yet, for one reason or another, wipe out like "The Wide World of Sports"' agony-of-defeat skier.

Often, these albums are bombarded with website tomatoes for reasons you can't necessarily hear through speakers: the band changes their sound and image to court a new crossover audience, perhaps, or attempts a mid-career shift into ill-advised territory. Or maybe they start writing songs about Moses in hip-hop slang. But sometimes the bad album in question is none of the above; it doesn't offend anyone's delicate scene-politics sensibilities or try to rewrite a once-successful formula in unfortunate ways. Sometimes an album is just awful. Make Believe is one of those albums."

The first trend is that critics kill copycats. The job of a critic is to know enough to be able judge novelty. The converse of this rule is probably true very often as well, namely, critics praise originality. Notice that critics seem to resort to their natural sensibilities rarely, only in extreme cases.

Critics do indeed pay attention to execution, that's for sure.¹ The awkwardly named bands, users of laser-printers for their cover art, are referred to as "fodder" producers. I think the real key behind this idea is that of intention. Critics ask themselves the questions:

1. What about this media is good?
2. Can the artist correctly answer question 1?

That criteria is probably good, since it measures reliability.

One of the stronger trends in the world of media criticism is the acclaim of new material, or re-released material by already established artists. Look at the all time best albums on Metacritic.com, for example, here's a link. In the top ten, there are several re-releases, a couple of compilations, and a couple of come-backs. The artists are Brian Wilson, Led Zeppelin, Nirvana, and Loretta Lynn. Soon to be added to the list is an album by the Rolling Stones. This trend makes a lot of sense, of course. All of these bands have influenced modern bands. It would be inconsistent to criticize them, because critics use them as measuring sticks. They are ostensible pioneers of particular genres.

A possible question at this point is, does "professional" criticism predict the success of media among the general public? For a class project my friend Josh Rotz measured the correlation between the Metacritic rating of movies and their profit. Yes, he took the trouble to control for variables like the number of theaters in which the movie played, and budget size. (Measuring profit as opposed to revenue effectively handles the latter.)

In the end, the critic ratings significantly predicted profit. According to Josh's data, for every increase in the rating on Metacritic (which ratings span 0 to 100,) the movies are expected to earn around 6 dollars more in profit per theater, per day. The movies are usually in lots of theaters, for quite a few days, so this is pretty significant. So, say 2 different movies are playing in 2000 theaters across the country, and one has a 70 rating and the other a 30, over the course of two weeks the 70 rated movie is predicted to make 6 dollars x 40 points difference in rating x 14 days x 2000 theaters=$6,720,000 more profit. Causality may run the counterintuitive way, i.e. people see movies because the critics liked them, but that possibility doesn't eliminate the weight of the correlation. (To put the 6.7 million profit figure in context, the average movie on Josh's list made over 101 million in profit.)

I'm not sure if my non-Metacritic meta-criticism followed it's own rules, but those are my 2 cents.

Notes:

1. Pixar Execution