2011-11-10dated from the article

Does Critical Acclaim Really Matter?

Written November 10, 2011. Platforms and services described here have changed. This is kept as a record, not as current advice.

Landing a good review in the music press is a prize highly sought after by most musicians. And Pitchfork.com is arguably the most influential music website in the United States, if not the world. Pitchforks review scale (down to the precision of decimal pointage) is loved and loathed in equal measure but the question is, does is really matter?

That is, aside from giving you nice things to print on a CD sticker, does getting a great review sell more albums for you? It’s a question Eric Harvey sought to answer. He compiled the (US) Soundscan data for Pitchfork.com’s Top 50 albums of 2010 and we were interested to see the results. We decided to chart up the data to more easily see the trends.

( Note we limited the chart to the Top 30 albums and some entries are missing in accordance with Harvey’s original list. Data was taken from January 12th Nielsen Soundscan ). Scoring a perfect 10.0 and taking the top spot in the Pitchfork list is Kanye West’s ‘ My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy ‘ and in this case there is a clear correlation between albums sold and Pitchfork love. For a current measurement and audience-data reference, see Chartmetric.

But it’s not a trend echoed in the rest of the list. Apart from the exceptions of Vampire Weekend and Arcade Fire the rest of the Top 30 don’t break the 300,000 unit barrier and most don’t exceed sales of 100,000. So on first glance the answer to the question seems to be ‘no’, critical acclaim doesn’t have a proven impact on record sales.

Of course there is no way to test whether these albums would have sold less well had they not been scored so highly by Pitchfork reviewers. Nor indeed can we factor out Pitchforks (laudable) celebration of independent, left-field artists over mainstream, major label acts with marketing and distribution support. 48,700 units of Joanna Newsome’s ‘ Have One on Me’ might not seem like a lot of sales when compared to the 450k+ sales of Vampire Weekend’s ‘ Contra ‘, but it is a lot if we know that her ambition (and I’m speculating here) was to sell 25,000.

In that instance the good review given by the tastemakers at Pitchfork might have yielded sales that otherwise wouldn’t have happened. So to answer the question, the answer has to be ‘yes’. While we can’t directly measure the effects of positive press on album sales (yet) we can safely assume that good press leads to exposure which leads to more people discovering your music and therefore purchasing it.

In the information age, positive information matters.