How to Become a Music Reviewer
If you love music, have strong opinions about it and want to share your knowledge of music and musical history or your opiinion about a magazine's rating of a song or album, you may want to become a music reviewer.
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Instructions
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Rate music on popular public sites such as Amazon for free. With Amazon's rating system, you can give star ratings as well as explain what you did and did not like about each album. User content is welcome, as well as interaction with other reviewers and readers who can tell you whether your review was helpful. If Amazon feels that your opinion is really making a difference in the way people buy music and your reviews are helpful, they may invite you to join the Amazon Vine program that gives users the opportunity to receive free items to rate.
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Pay attention to the type of music that music magazines are reviewing. Ask them if they are accepting music reviews from freelancers or looking to hire a new music reviewer. Follow the proper submission guidelines to see if it's possible to submit your new content and introduce your background. If you already have reviews at another publication, make sure to include text samples, not just links. There are far too many viruses going around, and a publisher or editor will not want to have to search all over the Web looking for your work. Also, look at the focus of the magazine's interest and buy a couple of archived copies as well as the latest one. Do not try to change the magazine editor's mind about the focus of the music. If "The Source" is a hip-hop magazine, chances are its editors are not interested in your review about the latest CD by Radiohead.
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Read newspaper reviews. Some newspapers, such as the Chicago Defender, don't have music reviews in their papers while others, such as the Chicago Sun-Times, do. Check with your local newspaper to see what type of music it covers.
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Distribute your review of a CD to the record label. It may be a stretch, but every once in awhile, promoters may use quotes from your review to appeal to a larger audience base. Book clubs have been doing this for years. They start off small, and before you know it, authors are specifically sending them books just to get a review from that club (e.g., Rawsistaz Book Club). Music isn't much different. It's not an accident that there are hundreds of messages sent to MySpace users daily asking for reviews and comments on their profile page.The artists must have a fanbase to gain in popularity, and sometimes user reviews are added to media kits for others to read.
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Rate music on MySpace, not in the traditional sense of leaving a profile comment or a blog comment. Create your own blogs full of reviews of artists you like. The word will spread. Music artists on MySpace are already trying to get attention for their music, and if they see someone who is setting up blogs catering to the music scene, this may bring you free CDs and exposure. Never underestimate MySpace, especially when music artists such as rapper Soulja Boy gained his notoriety by spreading the word on MySpace. So far, nobody has made a career from reviewing music on MySpace, but the success of Soulja Boy was unheard of, too.
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Comments
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music reveiwing, what an exciting path any music lover can take. there's a lot more to music - a world of experience.
