A gentle introduction to Resident Advisor’s authority on taste

It’s safe to say that Resident Advisor is one of the highest authorities in the electronic music world. The brand has come a long way since Nick Sabine and Paul Clement launched their Australian-focused online magazine back in 2001. Now operating from London, Berlin, LA, Sydney, and Tokyo, RA markets itself as an “ecosystem of content and services for over four million readers a month.” Their bragging is fairly honest – in fact, nowadays most promoters advertise on RA Guide and an even bigger fraction of artists do what they do in hopes of a shout-out on RA’s website.

One of the magazine’s hallmark features is its reviews section. The content has always followed a fairly standard template – a little bit of context, some archival details, and, ultimately, a rating. For many readers, I imagine that this rating often makes the difference between finding the tune on YouTube and clicking on the next review.

Needless to say, debate over controversial ratings is fairly commonplace. The old, “Resident Advisor’s got it all wrong” or “RA doesn’t know what it’s talking about,” cards are thrown about quite a bit. To be honest, these enthusiasts are taking everything a bit too seriously. We should all know that music reviews are inherently subjective, and numeric ratings can be even more questionable. While discussing ratings’ validity is slightly pointless, understanding how, or why, RA gives the ratings it does can be more purposeful.

I got the idea for this article a while back – after Photek’s “T’Raenon” had been accredited with the esteemed “5 out of 5.” The layout of RA’s website makes finding all the other 5-star pieces difficult. So, after a bit of training with ‘the machine,’ I decided to swipe all the reviews into my own database.

I picked up 10,949 of RA’s singles reviews. There were a few mistakes in the scraping of the data – more so for the older reviews, but the effect is quite minimal. The first review goes all the way back to Terry Francis’ “How can something…”  (March 2002) and ends with Taraval’s “No Coast” (March 2018).

Just like RA’s reviews, this article should be taken with a grain of salt. The following analysis isn’t comprehensive, nor perfect. I’m also not trying to prove any particular argument – here are just a few facts about the reviews that are otherwise hard to see without some nerdy data science doo-dah.

Let’s start with how the ratings look like in general.

The imprecise nature of music reviewing couldn’t be clearer. Those big spikes at 3.5, 4.0, 4.5 and so on, show that RA’s sticking to the sort of “Meh, Decent, Yes Fam, Banger” rating system. This makes sense — I don’t think even the reviewers themselves could explain the difference between, say, a 3.6 and a 3.7.

Below is a breakdown by genre.

I’ve grouped quite a few of the tagged styles into 10 fairly broad genres. There were quite a few reviews that I couldn’t include for this because of how RA has tagged them. For instance, Moebius & Neumeier – “Zero Set II Reconstruct Vols. 1 & 2” is tagged with a style of “Techno, Disco, House, Experimental” (whatever that means). Also, I ignored all the reviews that are tagged with less common styles (of which there are quite a few).

As expected, House and Techno are the most commonly reviewed. At a glance though, the ratings don’t seem to show any clear preference for these two genres. Interestingly, Breakbeat and Dubstep are the highest rated genres on average. 

Next is a peep into how these reviews have changed over time.

The plot on the left shows the trend in monthly reviews done by RA. This one’s quite nice because it reflects how the brand has evolved over time. You can see the consistent growth throughout the noughties and divergence into non-traditional music coverage post-2010. As for the chart on the right, that’s all about the average monthly ratings. Even after ignoring the first few years of sparse reviews, it does look like RA was getting a bit stricter with their ratings for a while.

This next section is probably the juiciest. I’ve essentially compiled lists of RA’s heaviest players. The tables show the most featured labels and artists, as well as the records of the best and worst ratings that RA have ever given.

[su_list icon=”icon: hand-o-right”]

• • • All the singles rated 5 out of 5.
    • The worst rated singles.
    • The most featured artists.
    • The most featured record labels.

So, that’s all there is for now – hopefully, it’s been of some interest. If not, all the data and code can be found here. Feel free to find something better.

Written by Ismail Salim