Professional vs. consumer discourse communities: Comparative genre analysis of online music reviews

Even though rhetorical move-step analysis has originally been applied to academic texts, this approach has also been employed to genre analysis of other written genres for some time. Reviews constitute an interesting example of texts as they may significantly influence the perception of a particular work and its potential success or failure. The juxtaposition of texts written by professional and consumer reviewers allows one to pinpoint similarities and differences between the characteristics of these discourse communities. While book and film reviews have been subject to comparative genre analysis, music reviews have not received much scholarly attention in this realm. In order to fill this gap, this paper aims to provide a comparative move-step genre analysis of 100 online music reviews from two salient online reviewing websites, namely Pitchfork (professional reviews) and Rate Your Music (consumer reviews). For the purpose of this study, two subcorpora of music reviews, each consisting of 50 texts published between 2021 and 2023 were compiled. The corpus was manually annotated with the use of a rhetorical function protocol employing structural move analysis and fine-tuned to the specific needs of the corpus in question. Respective parts of reviews were assigned a particular rhetorical step, e.g., providing background of the artist. Steps were then grouped into moves, e.g., situating the album. Corresponding steps were extracted from each subcorpus to examine what patterns are most frequently employed to realize them. The results indicate that professional reviews encompass more descriptive rhetorical elements, whereas consumer reviews contain more evaluative rhetorical elements. There are also many rhetorical steps that can be found in both professional and consumer reviews, yet they have different linguistic realizations in the two subcorpora.