Critical Metrics

» see criticalmetrics.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Critical Metrics worked properly only if you had a Rhapsody subscription, and Rhapsody did not sell to Turkey. That is the cleanest way to explain why a site built for exactly the sort of person I was in 2008 was never going to be usable from where I sat. The charts loaded fine. The play button was for somebody else.

The site launched in the spring of 2007 in New York. Wikipedia's infobox says March and its own body text says April, and the first press pickup is a Wall Street Journal pick dated 28 April 2007, so the real answer is somewhere in those eight weeks. Joey Anuff built it. He had co-founded Suck.com in 1995, one of the first things on the web that had a voice, and he had done a stretch as a VH1 executive after that.

The premise cut against everything else in music recommendation at the time. The Hype Machine counted blog posts and Last.fm scrobbled whatever you played. Critical Metrics ignored the audience entirely: it read over 150 publications, print and online, reached back into historical sources as well, and ranked songs on what professional critics had actually written about them. The site carried streaming audio and YouTube videos next to each recommendation, with a link out to iTunes if you wanted to own the thing.

People in the business liked it a great deal. Boing Boing and BusinessWeek both wrote it up in 2007, it was named a Connected Innovator at Supernova that June, and CNET made it a Webware 100 finalist in March 2008. The line that stuck came from Ann Powers, then the senior music critic at the Los Angeles Times, writing in Slate in December 2007: she kept a window open to Critical Metrics on workdays, "my favorite snobby Top 40 station".

~ the dossier ~

~ how the ranking worked ~

The method was borrowed from academia rather than from music. Critical Metrics treated reviews and published playlists the way a citation index treats papers: it hunted for positive mentions of a given song and rolled the weighted result into an index you could sort. The Wikipedia article names bibliometrics and sentiment analysis as the two fields it drew on, which in 2007 made it an early and fairly literal attempt to automate taste measurement rather than taste itself. The output was a chart of what the critical press had collectively endorsed that week, which is a different object from a chart of what people were listening to, and a much smaller one.

~ the last page it served ~

The free music went first. At launch the site streamed the songs itself; then a licensing arrangement with Rhapsody replaced that, which removed the free listening and handed unlimited playback and playlist building to Rhapsody subscribers only. For a discovery site, putting a paywall between the recommendation and the song is a hard trade, and Rhapsody's footprint at the time was the United States.

The archive gives the end precisely. criticalmetrics.com served a 20,479-byte homepage on 25 November 2011, the same size it had been serving for most of three years. There are no captures at all for the next three months. On 2 March 2012 the address answers 503, which is a dead web server speaking, and by 10 May 2012 it is a lander whose keywords are cash advance and debt consolidation. The grave is filed at the last day it served, with the 503 as the second date, because the gap between them is too wide to call a day with any confidence.

The domain is still a lander in 2026, now rotating through whatever the parking network is selling this month. Joey Anuff kept working; the site he built to count critics outlasted a fair number of the publications it was counting.

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