What is MA's goal as far as the quantity of reviews per album is concerned. For example, if there are 15 reviews for an album does MA want more? 20 reviews? It seems like around 20 is the cut-off point with a few exceptions.

I was wondering, in a perfect world, how many reviews would each release on MA have? What would be the perfect number to express a variety of opinions without overloading the site?

It probably depends not only on the quantity, but the quality. So, if there's 20 reviews, a new review might get accepted just because of it's quality. But it seems that the mods don't like anything over about 25

So, in an ideal world every album would have 25 perfectly written reviews to its name?

In an ideal world it would not matter whether or not there's an arbitrary level of reviews per album; all reviews would be extraordinary.

I think the ideal is to give the readers a general idea about the concensus.

I must say, to get a better impression, I personally do prefer albums having more than at least 5 reviews (and consequently scores) to get a more general idea. Albums with one or two fanboy reviews or just people bashing them... well, I'll go look somewhere else for a better general idea.

If an album has more than 15 reviews, it's often just because it's one of the 'bigger' well known bands (and thus more fans and bashers). Does not say anything about the quality or lackthereof.

I don't believe MA really has a hard cap on any number of reviews an album can have. I vaguely remember on a couple occasions it being said that the reason albums don't usually pass the low / mid 20's is that the standards just grow higher and higher, to the point where the average or worse reviewer wouldn't be able to get accepted.

For example, I doubt I could get a review for United Abominations accepted. Not that I'd want to; I try to limit the albums I review to 10 or less. Any more and it starts to feel a little pointless. If 15 reviews all say, "Yes, buy this album!" Chances are the 16th wouldn't change my opinion.

I think the reviews may also be added based on their content (i.e. If there are 7 reviews giving an album praise, and someone gives the album a negative review due to their personal tastes, that review is probably more likely to be accepted over another review talking about how great the band is). I think they probably would not care how many reviews there are so long as they are all diverse, though there are only so many words to describe an album.

There is no real answer to this question, but Diatribe has the right general idea: ideally, an album page with many reviews would have submissions that express a wide variety of different sentiments. In practice, most albums that see this kind of heavy volume of submissions receive primarily strong positive reviews (differentiated largely by format), so there often comes a point where negative assessments have a slightly easier time being accepted. This stage usually passes fairly quickly, and eventually the scarcest sort of sentiment of all becomes one that is somewhere in the middle ground. This does occasionally work in the opposite direction, as demonstrated by something like Waking the Cadaver--that is, strong negatives predominate, giving positives a slightly easier initial time--but most of these cases seem to be related to board socializing more than anything else (e.g. Rainfall, Shadow of Death, etc.), and middle scores in these cases are generally just as scarce as in the (far more common) popular case, above.

"Iconic" bands--your Metallicas, Darkthrones, Morbid Angels, etc.--have, simply by dint of the great volume of submissions they receive, by this point generally seen most of the spectrum of sentiment well covered (though positives are still a considerable majority, and middle scores are in many cases still the most comparatively rare) in considerable depth, and so the majority of submissions for these bands/albums have a pronounced challenge in getting accepted. Different mods have different policies, of course. I myself don't generally accept Metallica (for example) reviews anymore, unless they make an interesting argument or employ an interesting writing style (I usually tell writers that at least look like they put a little effort in to try their hands at reviewing something that hasn't been reviewed to fucking death); other mods might only require that new reviews be written at a high level of general presentation quality. All in the all, the point is that while there is not currently and has never been any official cap--it is theoretically possible to have an album page with 50+ reviews--standards/relevance requirements and periodic cleanings of shabby old reviews nevertheless tend to keep the numbers on pages below 30.

The number of reviews should be proportionate to the content of the album. There's only so much you can say about an 8 minute demo with 2 songs.

I don't see why there would be such a thing as "too many reviews" for an album, except that the site's somewhat lousy presentation would make it tough to navigate a review page with an arbitrarily large number of reviews. Perhaps as of M-A 2.0, this will be resolved.

Amazon.com handles the problem pretty nicely, although admittedly it is a different kind of animal.

Some of the Amazon book reviews get so cluttered for popular authors, for example, that I find myself gravitating towards reading medium scores. Just to save myself a headache as those seem the most honest or straightforward.

On a lesser scale, with the more quality writers this site has been acquiring I wouldn't see that as a problem, except, well for the mods meticulously going through and approving the bad from the less frequent good. I'm sure there's a lot more to it than meets the eye.

It's unfortunate that many people who want to review the album just want to change the number for it's average score. That being said there would be too many people giving this 0's or 100's without being civil at all. That's why they have to let people through that know how to do and are clearly thinking.

Here are some relevant, albeit not particularly important, stats. For each review-count, the number of releases with that many reviews, and the average rating. E.g., there are 2 releases with 22 reviews each, and the average rating for those 2 release, put together, is 29.5.

Ignoring the three statistically-insignificant groups at the top (one of the 22s is everybody trashing poor Cryptopsy), you see that there's a very slight overall pattern to this: as a release gets more reviews its overall rating initially goes up a little, and then flattens out a bit. Makes sense, I think. A release wouldn't have multiple reviews unless somebody cared, and the more reviews are submitted, the more a balance asserts itself (or is asserted by the mods). But it's a pretty small effect, overall.