Is music better than film?

Possibly, but this mix of reviews extends to the limited release (generally indie or "indie") movies listed below the wide release (Hollywood) as well.

But don't movie reviews tend to hit the newstands at roughly the same time? Music reviews trickle out over a longer period of time, giving one review a larger possibility of influencing others. This could be an explanation.

Utter disaster movies (Gigli, Ishtar, Howard the Duck, etc) may be an exception in that there was so much pre-release anti-buzz on it.

But in cinema, indie/arthouse/non-English/whatever the hell = "not mainstream" movies represent a small part of the total reviews. In music, where the mainstream is really a delta of main streams, often more interesting or inventive than their indie counterparts, there's more likely to be a greater proportion of works that reviewers enjoy.

It's also interesting that there are a lot of movies (particularly of the action/blockbuster variety) that get crap reviews but make loads of money. This is far less common in music, I believe. So the attitude of the movie critic may be "I can write whatever I want, and it won't figure much into the movie's bottom line, so I might as well completely rip it apart to hammer home my point".

Santa Monica lawyers, according to their "about" page, playing around with yet-another-among-thousands Internet pseudo-content site that purports to order and assign metrics to something not orderable. Since they frequently assign numerical values to my reviews, which neither lend themselves to such things or carry them, they certainly qualify as free-range chumps.

online music critics are even worse, with the ratings scale sometimes expanded to 11/10, or 10 ++, just to cope with the exaggerated ratings of all other albums.

"The amount of music being made is far, far greater than the number of movies being made."

i thought this would have the opposite effect, with the average music rating dropping instead of rising.

It would, if the number of reviewers was proportional to the amount of product, and if everyone reviewed a bit of everything. But as NV pointed out, the music scene is extremely fractured, so that albums are more likely to be reviewed by fans or specialists of the genre in question. In turn, they assign higher ratings.

Ah, yes. Grade inflation. Christgau admits to it in his Consumer Guide books (at least in the 90s book I own).

they frequently assign numerical values to my reviews, which neither lend themselves to such things or carry them

Interesting. I did notice this in some reviews. I'm still not so willing to dismiss the site out of hand, however.

Also, it was odd that they assigned a 100 to a Christgau Consumer Guide that was graded A. An A+ would get the same 100, I assume. An A should probably get a 95 and an A+ a 100.

The specialist angle is interesting, though. But even outside of Metacritic, I pick up magazines that assign numerical or x-out-of-y stars and the reviews tend towards just slightly above average (the 60 to 70 range, say, of Metacritic.