Anyone interesting in writing music reviews?
Soft launching mixtapeattack.com today. It still needs work, but if you’re up for writing some reviews, it could use some content to fill it out.
Comments
yea
Well go sign up, dum dum.
yes!
Just saw your signup (and yours, Kev). Made you both writers so you can start writing.
Questions:
- Where are you pulling data/images from? and if something isn’t there, how the heck would one get the legal right to distribute said image?
- What happens when more than one person reviews an album? I’m guessing once that happens there’s some sort of sorting function but since nothing is there yet, I’m more curious than anything.
- The “legal right” thing is just to cover my own ass. You can grab images from anywhere, but if, for whatever reason, someone issues me a takedown notice, I can claim ISP rights and absolve my responsibility while protecting the users as being anonymous. That said, I really don’t forsee this ever happening. It’s just a precaution. I’m also trying to figure out a way to do audio samples, maybe with the Lala player, but I dunno if that’s at all feasible.
- The site is designed with just that in mind. Unfortunately the Album view page is still a mess, but essentially, it averages the ratings into an overall rating and lists the individual reviews under the album. The idea is sort of having less of a top-down approach to music review. It always bothered me how sites like Pitchfork or magazines like Spin or Rollingstone have a sort of “THIS IS OUR OPINION OF THIS ALBUM” despite the magazie being made up of several people. I hope this makes things a bit more transparent and opens up some discussion.
In addition, I’m tracking a sort of standard deviation between ratings. Albums that are highly contentious (as, I’m sure, Kid A will be… lots of 1s and lots of 10s) will have a high contention rating letting people know that while the average score is only 5, people are very passionate about it. And on top of that, I’m going to open it up to the whole internet and let people rate albums (but not review them) giving a separate score. Just to see how our own opinions differ from whatever readers we may aquire. Gotta aquire some readers first, though.
But yeah. Big plans. This is just the foundation. Swift Kick will build off of this and be lit publishing, too, so even bigger plans there.
Get writing, peeps.
Someone should write a review of my band’s EP. Unless you don’t like it, then don’t.
Also I’ll start writing once the semester is over, otherwise I won’t do any homework.
I was planning on it tonight, actually. I have some more work to do on the site and needed a few multi-review albums to see how it looks, so others should do the same.
Anything, audio-wise, I should link to? Clips or whatnot?
I guess you could link to out lame myspace.com/tachyonradio
I’m pretty much just going to hang back wait, then as you write reviews, I’ll go in and write opposing reviews saying why you are wrong.
Pft, who are you kidding? You’re going to agree with 95% of my picks like you always do.
John said:Pft, who are you kidding? You’re going to agree with 95% of my picks like you always do.
Given that your first 2 reviews are Tool and Real Estate, that would make you 100% wrong.
Tool was a demo review from last year because I had the album cover image lying around.
Real Estate was because I could easily copy/paste the review from here.
I just need to be sure to be the first to review Beatles albums.
Go for it. I will follow up shortly thereafter.
I’ve been posting one review a day — mostly re-copying reviews I posted here. But as such, I now have the only four reviews on the front page. What gives, folks!? Write some shit!
I will start posting reviews in 1 week, when the semester is over. i’ve got all these projects and finals and crap.
i just tried to post a review and it kept telling me to enter an artist name….but i did, like 4 times.
Yeah, I had everything typed out and filled in and when I hit submit it said the release date I entered wasn’t valid, but it erased everything else I had put in. Then I did it again and submitted it but nothing showed up. Not sure if submissions go through you and then get posted or if it just didn’t take. The last time it didn’t give me any error or anything. Just didn’t post it.
Well that really sucks. Looks like you were reviewing Neurosis’ Shrinebuilder? The album went through, but nothing about the review. Interestingly, I got nothing on the error report, either.
It’s worth noting that Firefox saves your form contents on shit like this. So should something go wrong, definitely go for the back button. But I’ll search the logs and see if I can’t find your lost review. Sucks that it’d go missing like that. I’ll try to figure out what went wrong.
Ryan, were you reviewing Jason Lytle? I just saw that in the logs, too.
Luckily, it looks like both of your reviews are in the logs. I just have to figure out what went wrong…
Ok, some somehow you guys BOTH got to the albums index where it lists all the albums in the system. I honestly have no idea how you got there. But I’m guessing you then clicked “new album” and filled out the form that gave you. Which is not a form I ever intended anyone to see. Ever. Obviously, I left a redirect or link in there somewhere, so if you guys remember how you got there, by all means, let me know. I gotta track that down asap to prevent anyone else from heading down the wrong path.
So I’ve deleted it. From now on, please use the “Contribute” link at the top of the page to submit any reviews.
It’s also possible your date formats fucked up the review (it’s way more strict than it should be). As such, I’ll be replacing the date entry for album releases with drop downs that can’t be wrong. So hopefully that’ll fix a few of these issues.
Ok, so I think I have everything set.
I’ve now got a few more bugs on my sticky full of bugs that need fixing. Honestly, the site needs a solid day’s worth of work cleaning it up. And then some more adding new features. But by all means, keep adding those reviews cause the more activity the site gets, the more it helps me figure it all out.
And the more interesting the site is. Which, really, is far more important. I’m totally grabbing both the Shrinebuilde and Lytle albums right now.
OK. I finally decided to sign up for this today. I can read reviews and comment, but I can’t seem to figure out how to post my own review. I don’t see a “contribute” link. Am I missing something glaringly obvious?
I posted a Real Estate review since you had mentioned you wanted multiple people to start reviewing the same albums and giving them ratings. But like the others I’ve tried it gave me an error and didn’t seem to take. Oh well.
Jay said:OK. I finally decided to sign up for this today. I can read reviews and comment, but I can’t seem to figure out how to post my own review. I don’t see a “contribute” link. Am I missing something glaringly obvious?
I have to make you a writer first. Which I’m doing now.
Kevin said:I posted a Real Estate review since you had mentioned you wanted multiple people to start reviewing the same albums and giving them ratings. But like the others I’ve tried it gave me an error and didn’t seem to take. Oh well.
GOD DAMNIT. I spent several hours last night fixing shit. I coulda swore these were gone. I will fix this shortly.
Kevin said:I posted a Real Estate review since you had mentioned you wanted multiple people to start reviewing the same albums and giving them ratings. But like the others I’ve tried it gave me an error and didn’t seem to take. Oh well.
Same here.
You guys are all entering summaries that are too long. You need to keep ‘em within 100 characters. FOr some reason, the error checking isn’t working on that, but the form lets you know right under the box how many characters are in your summary.
I get confused by the summary section. I think there should just be a review section, with the summary being the first sentence or 2 of the review.
Kevin said:I get confused by the summary section. I think there should just be a review section, with the summary being the first sentence or 2 of the review.
No. For two reasons:
1. The summary section is under 100 characters so it can be tweeted to people who want to follow the twitter account to keep track of new reviews on the site.
2. The summary has to be under 100 characters to conform to the rather strict width/height specs on review listings.
3. The opening of a review often times does not summarize the review, but is a segue leading into the review. This doesn’t help much when you’re browsing reviews and you want to get an idea of what the overall impression of the review is.
- is really the most important. It’s sort of the rotten tomatoes effect. Thing is, rotten tomatoes has a staff that hand picks those summaries. We do not. I’d prefer to give the authors the option of how they prefer to summarize.
Perhaps I should detail this out a bit on the actual review page.
Bunch of bugfixes and features coming soon and I have a question for you all. Read here: http://mixtapeattack.com/news_items/6
I’m damn near positive my summary wasn’t 100 characters. But, the counter doesn’t seem to be working either, at least not in real-time.
Neh, it counts once you click OUT of the box. Not the ideal behavior, definitely, but a quick fix for a larger issue to be addressed later.
Got ya, and yeah, I probably did exceed 100 characters by a few. I just reposted and it worked.