Any Decent Music?
.jpg) |
|
|
Type of site
|
Music webzine |
|---|---|
| Owner | PalmerWatson |
| Website | anydecentmusic.com |
| Launched | 2009 |
| Current status | Active |
AnyDecentMusic? is a website that collates album reviews from magazines, websites, and newspaper. It includes music albums, covering rock, pop, electronic, dance, folk, country, roots and urban. Reviews are sourced from more than 50 websites, magazines and newspapers, largely from the US and UK, but also from Canada, Ireland and Australia.
AnyDecentMusic? was set up in 2009 by Ally Palmer and Terry Watson, the directors of PalmerWatson, a newspaper and magazine design consultancy. On creating the site: "Newspapers are our business (and we're passionate about them). Our other passion is music, and we've combined the two things."
The site's creators, Palmer and Watson, say: "[AnyDecentMusic?] surveys reviews of recent album releases in newspapers and websites and provides a constantly updated chart of critical reaction."
Ratings are averaged and albums ranked in a chart intended to give an overall picture of critical appraisal of current releases, based on the averaged score out of 10. This chart forms the centrepiece of the site. Users can also view charts showing rankings over 3 months, 6 months or 12 months. It is also possible to view a genre-specific chart, or to exclude genres not of interest.
Short extracts of the review are provided, with hyperlinks to the original article. Some print-only reviews are also included, but not all of these have extracts from the original. AnyDecentMusic? assesses reviews which do not provide a numerical score and assigns what it deems to be an appropriate score, based on the tone and content of the review. On album review pages, there generally is a link to streaming media service such as Spotify.
The music website AltSounds was added to the list of ratings sources in November 2012. They announced it by saying: "AltSounds has recently joined the tastemaking chart website Any Decent Music, where our reviews are a part of the construction of the album chart."
In July 2012, an AnyDecentMusic app was launched within the music streaming service Spotify. This was Spotify's App of the Day on July 19. It was described by Spotify: "Developed from the AnyDecentMusic.com chart, which provides music lovers with constantly updated listings of the most critically-acclaimed albums, this novel Spotify app uses ratings from the leading expert, independent review sources across the world to help you discover the best in new music". According to Palmer and Watson, "the focus on the ADM Spotify app is on all contemporary genres, from indie to electronic to hip hop and everything in between." They went on to explain the website's process of aggregating reviews:
...
Wikipedia