It’s an interesting discipline, this writing-about-music lark. In an age when forming your own opinion about a song requires little more than a broadband connection, it arguably has less relevance than ever. Why read a lengthy synopsis about a piece of music when there are numerous ways to seek it out for yourself and make your own mind up?
This approach has even extended beyond single tracks - sites like Deezer and We7 will allow you to stream whole albums before deciding to fork out money for them.
Nevertheless, you’re never going to go short of wordage once you delve into the music blogosphere. The time and effort that goes into detailing writers’ passion for the music they cover is considerable, and provides a more subjective alternative to the traditional music press.
On My Chemical Toilet we don’t really do album reviews, since you can find plenty of them elsewhere. However I have used the site’s Twitter as a supplementary digest of music I’ve been listening to, alongside snippets of opinion - while I’m not going to do a “proper” review of Keane’s or The Saturdays’ new albums, I might tweet what I think about them.
That approach has now been ripped off adopted by a site called Musebin, which Wired recently took a look at.

As Twitter limits you to 140 characters or less, so too does Musebin. Adam Varga, Musebin’s COO, has outlined the fact that the site is “a reaction to the wordy, wordy MP3 blogs” (get that? they’re not just wordy, they’re “wordy, wordy”).
Once reviews have been submitted they can themselves be rated with “Yea” or “Nay” buttons, rather like sites such as Digg and Reddit, which rely on the wisdom of the community to ensure the best content remains most visible.
I’d question whether the “Yea”/”Nay” buttons may be open to if not abuse, then at least confusion. Someone might write a concise and informative review of the new Snow Patrol album, but do you rate the review based on how it’s written or how much you like/loathe Snow Patrol? It could be the best review on the site, but I would have to fight my instinct not to “Nay” it purely because I don’t want Snow Patrol getting any more positive exposure than is strictly necessary. Childish? Yes. But it’s also how people on the internet behave when it comes to music.
So what of the concept of the site as a whole? Well, I’m awaiting my invite as I write, so I can’t give a first-hand perspective. However my first thought on seeing the list of In Rainbows reviews in Wired’s article - aside from “Good God, these reviews are pretentious” - was: why not just go to Metacritic, which provides summaries of album reviews in a similarly pithy manner - only, these reviews come from considered, edited and “professional” articles. So while the full articles themselves might not have that bloggy, web 2.0 ring about them, the snippets and accompanying scores do what Musebin seeks to.
Of course if you’re more apt to trust the music reviews of “normal” people, but you don’t want to be bored senseless by their inability to string more than a couple of sentences together, Musebin will come into its own. I will follow it on Twitter in the hope that some of the substance of its reviews are shared there, but I guess sharing too much in that medium might be counterproductive for the site owners. And while I might be a doubter I dare say there are a lot of folk on Twitter who crave more music-related content in a similarly easily-digestible format.
There’s a part of me that wonders whether, as single tracks have started to threaten the validity of the album, pithy reviews like those at Musebin might indeed be the future of music reviewing. But there’s not much room for ambivalence in 140 characters, let alone personality - it would take quite a skilled wordsmith to capture the many conflicting feelings one often has towards an album. And what about focusing on individual tracks, whether positively or negatively? Will people be able to illustrate that an album is magnificent except for a few self-indulgent stinkers in the space of a couple of sentences?
I imagine the site owners might point out that Musebin isn’t designed to provide such multi-faceted opinions when it comes to album reviews - but unfortunately for them that tends to be what people look for in music criticism. It’ll be interesting to see how the site fares.
[Source: Wired Listening Post]

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1. U2’s new single as reviewed by My Chemical Toilet’s Twitter followers

2. We7.com and Sony BMG bring free (ad-supported) music to your ears

3. Does Kate Nash Deserve XFM’s New Music Award? Apply To Get On The Voting Panel

4. Dispatches From Beardsville - The Americana Music Association Awards winners announced

5. Free music from Foo Fighters, Mark Ronson and more? Really? Can I keep it?

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Posted by Stuart Waterman on Monday November 17th, 2008 at 1:45 pm