Over the last few months, we’ve been mulling over some changes to how we review new releases and gigs, and as of today, we’re “officially” dropping star ratings from all of our reviews.
Writing about music is changing as fast as listening to it is, and because of that we wanted to take a fresh look at how we’re doing things. We weighed up the pros and cons of having to rate things at all, and we decided that it was worth trying something different going forward.
While people evidently still enjoy reading about gigs and albums (if for nothing else apart from discovering new music), we don’t think that people want to be told to like or dislike something strongly when making their own mind up is so easy nowadays. We also wanted to experiment to keep things fresh. We’ve got a sneaky suspicion that removing the need to rate something will turn our approach to talking about music on its head, and allow us to entice people to new music rather than batter them over the head with one person’s opinion set to a score that sort of fits what they’re talking about.
And if it doesn’t work, we can always just put them back on again, can’t we?