Voices within the online album review: Direct quotations as pathways to a genre network

Online album reviews are a prominent part of web based music discourse owing to the significant role that albums play in pop culture. Despite this, they received scant scholarly attention in linguistics. To address this lacuna, this study aims to identify and classify direct quotations in online album reviews in order to map the genre network that the online album review belongs to. Using QDA Miner qualitative analysis software, direct quotations were coded according to their source genre within a specialized corpus of 100 album reviews published between 2021 and 2023 across three music review platforms (Slant Magazine, NME and Pitchfork). The frequency of quote types was identified and their word coverage (the amount of textual space taken up by quotations) was calculated. Following Bhatia’s (2016) model of interdiscursively relevant genre networks, it was established why reviewers recontextualize materials from adjacent genres. The analysis shows recurring quotation types, for example artist quotations from interviews that provide background information or lyric quotations from songs that support readings of the album narrative. The frequent use of lyric quotations underscores the review’s dependence on the review object (the album), owing to which reviews are referred to as a parasitic genre (Gullestad, 2011). The study demonstrates that online album reviews rely on other genres (e.g., interviews, press materials, album lyrics) to contextualize artistic intent, position albums within cultural conversations, and anchor the reviewer’s evaluative claims. The study offers insights relevant to strengthening review literacy, defined as the capacity to comprehend review discourse and to construct reviews in an informed manner (Jaakkola, 2024).