How to decipher album review star ratings

i've come to the conclusion that I don't generally end up liking "5 star" or 10.0 albums. all my favorite albums from recent years get middling reviews. When I look up my favorite recent albums on metacritic, they're all like 60-80 rated albums. maybe because they're more polarizing?

Usually, when I'm reading up on an album I don't know anything about, I will first seek out user reviews with 2.5-4 star ratings -- it takes no effort to rate something 5 stars or 0 stars, because it just means you really love it or really hate it. To write a review, and then rate it 3.5 stars usually means you had to think about it, and consider stuff you liked and disliked. This mainly applies to user reviews (as opposed to published criticism), and goes for pretty much anything (music, movies, yelp reviews, etc). Haha I am a nerd.

well, with yelp and amazon 5 i avoid five star ratings because it says nothing so much to me as "friend of the owner/author". (this is why i give all my friends' books 4/5 star reviews, ha ha.) music it's different, and frankly i tend to assume star ratings are assigned by a machine putting them into a modified poisson distribution and ignore them. that said the most interesting star rating to me is 3.5, which says to me "interesting but flawed". the worst is 2.5, which says to me "interesting but terrible".

Yeah, Amazon user reviews are utterly worthless. Just think of any album released in the last forty years, look it up on Amazon, and I can almost guarantee that it will be between 4-5 stars. 90% of the reviews were by fans, 10% trolls.

To add to above:
***** in Rolling Stone = friends of Jann Wenner

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJ16hCYBVZA

More translations plz!

I do wonder whether a "shorthand" version of a star rating can shed more light on a record than the full review did, sometimes.

Also, since 5 stars aren't always a reliable mark of greatness, are there any publications where an artist would prefer to get a 1-star review? (e.g. annoying the 'right' people)

It would be interesting to find out who was the first to develop ratings in music writing. Presumably they originated out of film/theatre ratings?

It's all just a bit of fun in the end, mostly inconsequential. Competition has always been a part of music. But I hope the point-scoring won't go too far and turn music into sports. Like, if fools started posting their bullshit monthly "power rankings" of rappers Oh Christ, they've started already. Or if someone made a Hall of Fame to show which rock star is the best quarterback, that would also be stupid.

The best description that I've seen in a rating system was (ironically) a sports one, years ago. Match magazine did reviews of soccer stadiums, in early-1990s Britain. So the lowest grade of 1 really did mean, avoid the place at all costs... Up to the highest grade, 10: "No one gets 10".

Apparently ILM has covered this once or twice in the past.

Perfect 10 on Pitchfork
Best and worst album reviews on Allmusic
why do writers like Matthew Murphy at Pitchfork always review my favorite records and never rate them outside of the 7-7.9 realm?
Best Album Rated 10.0 by Pitchfork Media Upon Its Initial Release
Vote for the Best Album of the Decade (from rateyourmusic.com top 50)
www.rateyourmusic.com C/D? (Geir's top 1,000 sadly offline)
Most positive/negative AMG writers
In which we point out instances of Allmusic changing their ratings from what they originally were
Should an album review justify its rating? Or vice versa?
conclusive proof that allmusic's "rating system" is flawed BULLSHIT
Stylusmagazine.com now grading like school reports

I used to think Star0stin's Only Solitaire rating system was overly convoluted, but that was before I came across this mind-bender while searching reviews of the new Caribou:

https://tapedeckpodcast.com/the-spectreview-color-rating-system/

Four days later and I'm still thinking about how convoluted this system is.

Convoluted to you.
But to all those tapedeckpodcast.com natives, they just intuitively know that yellow means...

(give me 15 minutes to parse that system and I'll get back to you about yellow)

Hmmm

3. Remember that these ratings are never completely free of the reviewer’s opinion.