Determining the best new releases in music has become a more difficult and imperative task in this age of information and media overload. Consumers of music, especially those who are too busy to spend more than an hour or two per week seeking out new material, now feel inundated by albums and albums of content by artists of varying degrees of familiarity. Publications, streaming services and radio stations take on this task by creating a veritable filtration system formusic, determining what constitutes the best new releases through a variety of formats.

For music websites, such as Consequence of Sound, a rating scale has become the preferred method for locating the perceived quality of music. From Rolling Stone’s original five star rating scale to XXL’s sliding scale of “L,” “XL” and “XXL,” a variety of metrics are used for determining the best new releases. Inside the variations lies information about the grading scale used. For a publication that views itself as more highbrow, like Pitchfork, a ten point scale (in which decimal points are not only allowed, but frequently used) allows them to get very nit-picky and hierarchical with their ratings. What constitutes the difference between an album that receives a 7.4 and one that nabs a 7.5? Only the site’s staff knows. Letter grade systems, familiar to the layman from most public school grading, are also common, and allow for a wide range of scores without the level of specificity that can sometimes seem pretentious.

For streaming services, the status of best new releases is much more crowd-sourced, with “what’s popular” charts taking precedent over critical opinions or even commercial standings. For this reason, most of these lists deal with songs rather than albums, as the modern music listener tends to stream individual songs from various albums and artists instead of entire albums. Using user popularity to determine the best new releases is more democratic and equalitarian, with a lack of corporate interests being refreshing in the modern music era, but it also creates a pack mentality that can overshadow or obscure artists on the fringes of culture, or those who are just getting their start. Grassroots marketing is hard to translate to success on platforms like Spotify, and thusly these best new releases charts skew similar to, if a bit younger than, pop radio charts.

What truly constitutes a best new release will always be up to the individual listener, but when being bombarded by more music than one could listen to in five lifetimes, it often helps to seek guidance, whether from music publications, streaming services or radio stations.