Art of Listening #14 with Keith Jopling
In this edition of The Art of Listening, Keith charts the evolution and unexpected revival of music criticism. From decades spent devouring newspaper reviews to today’s world of aggregators like Album of the Year and Rate Your Music, he explores how user ratings, fan communities and platforms like Pitchfork and The Needle Drop have reshaped what reviews mean in the streaming age. Once written off as obsolete in a world where anyone can listen to anything instantly, the humble record review is proving more essential and more influential than ever. A reminder that his book Body of Work: How the Album Outplayed the Algorithm and Survived Playlist Culture will be published 10th February 2026.
For about 30 years, I have religiously read the music reviews every Friday. Mostly The Guardian and The Times, but any other source I can get hold of. I can count the number of weeks I’ve missed on my hands. Even on holidays I would take a peak on my phone to check out the reviews. I’ve become highly familiar with the writing style of Will Hodgkinson (The Times) and Alexi Petridis (The Guardian) and many of the various music journalists who’ve written reviews for both papers. I’m not bound by whether they like what they write about, but the writing itself is full of insights, clues to whether I might like the record or not, and invariably contain potted histories of the artist’s career - something that fascinates me.
In more recent years, I’ve become a heavy user of review aggregator sites, firstly Metacritic, and then I discovered the music focused Album of the Year. Both of those sites aggregate critic scores across the media outlets, but also collate and average user reviews. It’s the user reviews on Album of the Year that the eye is drawn to. In a rare occurrence these days - a poorly received Taylor Swift album, The Life of A Showgirl user reviews are much more fun than the professional critics; “Alright the album is fine but it would be wayyy better with 26 special edition reissues 🤩” and “Taylor, I love you but you’re bringing me down” do what user reviews do better than the pros, say it all in as few words as possible.
I (still) love Pitchfork, and, after the hatchet job taken to it by parent company Condé Nast a while ago, I’m relieved that Pitchfork seems to be just as good - and just as relevant - as ever. And now Pitchfork is introducing user reviews too. Planned for 2026 to mark the publication's 30th anniversary, readers will be able to add comments to all album reviews (including the 30k reviews archive) and assign their own scores to albums using Pitchfork's infamous 0.0 to 10.0 rating system. Now that will be interesting.
Another user rated powerhouse is Rate Your Music. Now here is a curious thing – an open source website straight outta the year 2000 (literally, it was launched that year). RYM is an “online encyclopaedia” of music and films, with millions of user album reviews and ratings (out of five). It features theme and community-based charts for the highest-rated releases. It’s the rankings that work so well - the Top Albums of 2025 immediately unveils a bunch of records you’ve never heard of, and that never made the headlines with critics, but are ranked highly by music fans. It’s more effective and influential than official charts, and a lot more fun too. A good ranking on RYM can pretty much help an album swim rather than sink - something all music marketers and artists might want to take note of.
Nothing in music quite goes as far as Letterbox’d, the film buff app that has proved the power of media even in the age of streaming a superdistribution. Letterbox’d is a more holistic user experience, containing everything except the film itself (and after all, in film you need a dozen apps to be able to find the title you want - perhaps that’s why Letterbox’d succeeds where music fan media has failed).
As digital music took off, reviews gradually waned in relevance, along with music journalism itself. Why did we need reviews from music snob journalists when we can see which albums people actually like. By the time streaming got into its stride, it looked like the humble record review was well and truly dead - one of those pre-digital anachronisms that Spotify et. al. was built to crush. Music could now be discovered, counted, ranked and consumed all in one convenient place. Besides, critics have always had their critics, so to speak. Sibelius was thought to have said that "No one ever erected a statue of a critic” almost a century ago now, in 1937. Opinion journalism & critics was beginning to look antiquated well before the scaled, globalised and culturally flattened world of streaming.
In a piece for The New Yorker in August, called “How Music Criticism Lost Its Edge“ Kelefa Sanneh wrote that, “Over the years, “critically acclaimed” came to function as a euphemism for music that was semipopular, or maybe just unpopular”. The streaming age made the idea of a single person’s ‘authoritative’ opinion seem outdated and ridiculous, and also ushered in a culture whereby it became impolite - or just boring - to criticise music or anything else that other people like. Just let people like what they like.
But then, as with everything, the cyclical effect takes hold. The inexorable rise of social media has given artists, fans and yes, critics, a platform from which to scream their approval or disapproval, and for followers to act accordingly. Moreover, in a world of abundance, we have less precious time to try everything for ourselves anyhow - and so valuing other’s take on things is useful. In this environment, the review has once again found its feet.
But the review and the role of criticism has changed. Analysis suggests that critical reviews in the streaming era are just that bit less critical. Critics and reviews perhaps now function more like a binary switch; is this thing worth our time or not. I myself once tried to introduce a new format to replace the review, called the ‘album guide’ (self explanatory) but it didn’t really catch on. Someone who has had far more success with album reviews, is “the internet’s busiest music nerd” Anthony Fantano. His YouTube reviews and website The Needle Drop go down a storm with a large audience of millennials and Gen Zer’s who previously couldn’t have cared less about critics or reviews. Forget Rolling Stone, a thumbs up from Fantano can set a record on the way to success. It’s hard to know whether people are more entertained by his nerdy style than informed by his critical opinion (which can be quite long form by modern standards, running at 10 minute long videos in many cases). But arguably, the review was always much more than just an opinion. In the end, I forgive Clash for handing out four stars will-nilly (or 80% as the aggregators will convert it to) because it’s the words themselves that mean something.
So it seems, along with other enduring formats such as the album itself, the music review is enjoying a renaissance. Artists now proudly share (positive) reviews on their socials. Pitchfork’s reviews remain the outlet’s pride & joy. The Needle Drop is one of the most successful music media properties since, well, Pitchfork.
Suede’s Brett Anderson told me that he doesn't believe artists who claim to not read their own press. I suspect he was right in Suede’s hay day of the 90s, but then wrong as the digital age took off in the 2000s. Now he’s right again. Some cultural traditions simply go through transition and change, but they exist for a reason, and the reason stays the same. In truth, we don’t always know what we will like, our tastes are subject to change, sometimes abruptly. Embracing serendipity is one of the joys of consuming music. But we will always be drawn to what other people think about things before we make our own minds up.
Learn more about Keith Jopling:
Keith is a music strategist, advisor, consultant, writer and mentor. In 2021 he started the music podcast The Art of Longevity, featured under Spotify’s “must listen” music podcasts and on all other platforms. The archive sits on his music curation site The Song Sommelier.
Keith has worked with the boardrooms of labels, streaming services, start-ups and investors. He has held previous roles with Sony Music, Spotify, EMI and the BPI. Most recently he was Consulting Director at boutique music agency MIDiA Research (2019-2024) and began his career in music as Research Director at global trade body IFPI (2000-2006).
As an educator, he has lectured in music business, strategy and innovation at Henley Business School, NYU, BIMM, ACM, Belmont, Syracuse, Westminster and the University of Krems, Austria.