Here’s a bird’s-eye view of our dataset, in the gross, unvarnished output of R:

## score best_new_music author

## Min. : 0.000 Min. :0.00000 joe tangari : 815

## 1st Qu.: 6.400 1st Qu.:0.00000 stephen m. deusner: 725

## Median : 7.200 Median :0.00000 ian cohen : 699

## Mean : 7.006 Mean :0.05128 brian howe : 500

## 3rd Qu.: 7.800 3rd Qu.:0.00000 mark richardson : 476

## Max. :10.000 Max. :1.00000 stuart berman : 445

## (Other) :14729

## author_type pub_date pub_weekday

## contributor :12420 2000-03-31: 15 Min. :0.000

## : 3904 2000-04-30: 14 1st Qu.:1.000

## senior editor : 486 2001-03-31: 13 Median :2.000

## executive editor : 475 1999-04-20: 12 Mean :2.107

## senior staff writer: 439 2001-02-20: 11 3rd Qu.:3.000

## contributing editor: 210 1999-06-08: 10 Max. :6.000

## (Other) : 455 (Other) :18314

## pub_day pub_month pub_year genre

## Min. : 1.00 Min. : 1.000 Min. :1999 rock :7815

## 1st Qu.: 8.00 1st Qu.: 3.000 1st Qu.:2005 electronic :2900

## Median :15.00 Median : 6.000 Median :2009 :2365

## Mean :15.53 Mean : 6.283 Mean :2009 rap :1413

## 3rd Qu.:23.00 3rd Qu.: 9.000 3rd Qu.:2013 experimental:1141

## Max. :31.00 Max. :12.000 Max. :2017 pop/r&b :1128

## (Other) :1627

## label diversity length

## self-released: 419 Min. :0.0000 Min. : 0.0

## drag city : 263 1st Qu.:0.5448 1st Qu.: 498.0

## sub pop : 261 Median :0.5778 Median : 604.0

## thrill jockey: 241 Mean :0.5771 Mean : 650.1

## merge : 231 3rd Qu.:0.6108 3rd Qu.: 746.0

## warp : 210 Max. :0.8889 Max. :3688.0

## (Other) :16764

Already, some points arise:

Compilations abound, with “Various Artists” having 687 albums. The single most reviewed group/artist is Guided By Voices.

An album’s inclusion in Pitchfork’s annual end-of-year Best New Music is indicated by a 1, rather than by the ranking in the BNM list, which is too bad, but good on Mr. Conway to think of including this in the scraping.

All the top publishing days for the website in the summary function come up from the early years of Pitchfork, which was founded in January 1999.

The DJ Kicks mixtapes are the most reviewed series of album.

Too many artists make album series titled with Roman numerals.

Of Monteal’s 20 albums seem excessive.

The scores fall as such:

or precisely:

##Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max.

##0.000 6.400 7.200 7.006 7.800 10.000

Left-skewed data that’s nearly normal, meaning we can use all our usual statistical bag of tricks that our teachers taught us. Pitchfork, it seems, grades on a curve — if you release an album, you’re likely to get something near a C.

With the caveat that the dataset contains a number of albums with overlapping rows to account for each different genre category (one Radiohead album had 20 fucking rows) and that a number of rows were removed so that albums didn’t show up multiple times (for example, 20), the allotment of genres in Pitchfork’s corpus break down accordingly:

This graph may tempt one to begin ruminating on what these categories mean — whether “electronic” is a bona fide genre of music, why non-American music seems to be classified under the crude “global” genus, what it means that Pitchfork’s criticism so overwhelmingly focuses on rock, what this all says about the state of Music. Cross’s satire more than anything reflected how Pitchfork’s reviews aren’t really about music the same way that, say, John Elliot Gardner’s criticism is about music, whereby cantatas are broken down to the component level. If we were to submit to this temptation, one of us could proffer that maybe jazz receives such little attention because the institution of Pitchfork isn’t built to process that level of musical depth, so it defers to items whose significance is a balance of the cultural and the entertaining rather than the truly artistic, and that music has become more entertainment than art, which seems merely possible but not certain. So all we can from this graph is that Pitchfork reviews a lot of rock, but it increasingly reviews other genres of music, too.

Medium will only let place your image in the center or on the left side. You cannot place it on the right side. Lol.

At a glance, genre doesn’t seem to matter all that much in how Pitchfork disperses its scores. The question is how much weight to place on glances when dealing with data. To a large degree, glances have usurped previously popular methods of testing for significance. See that minor uptick in scores with global and jazz? Does that matter or not? I can testify that running significance testing on that data says it is. There are 144 reviews in the global category. That means you have to sample 144 articles from the other categories to see if their average scores are similar enough that they didn’t happen randomly. And if you do that, the test will tell you that they are in fact very significant. But this is 2017 — no one gives a shit about p-values anymore, but they provide an interesting point of tension.

Reviews by year and genre. The blue line is the mean score.

We could hypothesize that different groups of reviewers are more or less forgiving towards their subjects than others, but before we begin all that, allow me a diversion to present you with the contemporary state of affairs for writers:

This was an accidental visualization that began as a question of how scores break down by author type and turned out to be the starkest image I’ve seen of modern media’s dependence on freelancers. Unfortunately, this is certainly not particular to Pitchfork. As a person who himself has lived as a green point in some other publication’s chart, it’s a beautifully terrifying supernova.

But even with the debris swept away, there’s only another equivocal non-conclusion.

This suffers from the same limitation as the genre hypothesis, i.e., perhaps there is some significant difference among authors, but it’s a conjecture without the opportunity for refutation. With the data at hand, it’s not reasonable to deem an associate reviews editor as a peculiarly sycophantic brand of critic. So we’ll find another way in perhaps, looking at first at whether scoring is associated with the prolific.

Pitchfork has a somewhat loyal stable of writers; the median number of reviews per person is 123. The hypothesis here is that as writers gain experience, they jade and harden their opinions or they wisen and soften their views towards the flaws of others—either way, something changes.

As it turns out, neither of these is true. Instead, the writers are bound by the iron rules of statistics. In this case, that rule is the Central Limit Theorem. The CLT, a cornerstone in statistical theorems, states that if you have data of any distribution, and you sample from that data, and you take the average of those samples, the distribution of that data will turn out to be a normal, bell-shaped curve. Who doesn’t grow a bit giddy to see mathematical reality in the wild, and look, here it is. The more reviews you write, the closer your average score over time is to the mean of roughly 7.0. (As a sidenote, it just so happens that the most prolific 20 percent of Pitchfork review writers are responsible for 80 percent of the total output of reviews, just like our old friend Pareto promised.)

What does appear correlated with higher scores is the length of the review.

This is interesting, but it doesn’t really let us predict the future; it doesn’t inform our understanding about what types of music Pitchfork reviews highly, only that once it has reviewed them, that the review will likely be longer if the score is higher. Logically, this makes sense: A writer will gush about an album he/she has fallen in love with, while a bad album is more likely (though certainly not certain) to be quickly dispatched. For example, see that one way down in the bottom left corner? If I recall correctly, that would be faux-leather Top 40 mistress Jet, which Pitchfork treated with a 0-point review and nothing more than a .gif of a chimpanzee pissing into its own mouth.

subset(reviews, score == 0 & length == 0) reviewid title artist

605494 shine on jet

LOL