I’ve always looked at music reviews as a way to determine what new albums and songs are worth my time. I like keeping up with what’s the latest and greatest in music, but listening to everything and anything that’s new is near-impossible with the amount of music that comes out every week.

Even though every listener doesn’t discover and filter out music this way, people go through the same process subconsciously. Today, most younger people find new music based on what their friends are sharing, or consume music from artists they’re already familiar with. We don’t “discover” music ourselves — we listen to what’s handed to us by like-minded people.

Whether we know it or not, we’re all participating in what I call this “mass filtration process” through reviews. In other words, the modern idea of “music discovery” — this mythical idea of organically stumbling upon your new favorite artist through the Internet — is a lie.

Internet music discovery through popular consensus limits what we listen to as well. If you only find new stuff to listen to through Pitchfork reviews, you’re probably missing out on a lot of more underground hip-hop and R&B, and near-entirely missing out on classical or world music.

Even if you avoid music reviews entirely, the mass opinion created by these tastemakers comes into play in the public eye with what’s considered “great music.” A lot of people otherwise entirely disinterested in hip-hop probably would’ve ignored Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp a Butterfly” without the music press’s collective excitement over the album, for example.

However, warts and all, I love music reviews and what they do to aid my constant search for new music. Like many people, I have limited time at all to listen to music, and even less to search for great music. Having professionals to find the good stuff for you is easier than looking on your own for the latest undiscovered gem, and it’s almost too easy to fall into that trap.

Here’s the big secret I’ll let you in on: Even the “music tastemakers” find their new favorites from someone else. The next big thing doesn’t just pop up out of nowhere. Heck, more than a few of my friends look up to me like I’m some music discovery guru, and I know I don’t put in that much effort at all. Because, let’s face it, sticking to a routine of checking a few reviews and discovery engines doesn’t require much hard work at all.

Finding new music is as easy or hard as you make it for yourself. But once you get into a familiar routine of looking through reviews and filtering out ones that get below a certain score, or paying attention to new releases from a certain artist, producer or label, it’s cake. As unromantic as it might seem to only listen to new music that gets a 4/5 or above from NME or a “Best New Music” tag from Pitchfork, that’s a big part of how the process works, and it lightens the load for a lot of heavier music listeners.

Brett Weiser-Schlesinger is a sophomore newspaper and online journalism major. His column appears weekly in Pulp. He can be reached at bweisers@syr.edu or on Twitter at @brettws.

Published on April 5, 2016 at 7:59 pm