how do i measure the consistency of artists?

Submitted by ericrohmerofmath t3_z35qrd in Music

So...... i wanna know who´s the most consistent musical artist (singer, band) of all time. I searched for the artist´s albums on metacritic, albumoftheyear and rateyourmusic, and gave a score on the album based on the score of those three websistes. I gave a score to all the albums, but i don´t know how i can calculate the consistency throughout all the artist´s carrer. So, i want some help. For example, Kanye west albums are like this:

84.03; 83.56; 76.7; 74.76; 89; 81.23; 76.8; 66.8; 51.36; 61.96. How do i find how consistent he is, compared to other artists? How do i calculate the percentage of consistency?

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Rodrat t1_ixk31mf wrote

I'm not sure what you're looking for. What consistency are you looking for? Just album ratings and over all positivity?

Music is so opinionated that it's impossible to define in this metric. Even a band as praised as the Beatles will have those who rate them poorly.

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ericrohmerofmath OP t1_ixk60t5 wrote

just album ratings. I don´t care if the band or the singer comes out only with bad albums. If he/she/they have 9 albums, and they all are rated 2, they are consistent on what they do. That´s what i want: Consistency throughout the carrer. I just need a way to measure this consistency with math. I´ve tried adding up all the ratings and dividing by the number of albums, but if an artist has just one album rated 5 and all the other rated 9, and he has 15 albums, he´s pretty consistent. But the album rated 5 will make the total go down

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PercySledge t1_ixk1tzu wrote

This is an easy one. Kanye West hasn’t released a worthwhile solo album since Life of Pablo which came out about 8 years ago, so what this means is he’s categorically not a consistent artist. No maths needed. Glad to be of service.

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[deleted] t1_ixk2z7f wrote

He hasn't been good since college dropout

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PercySledge t1_ixle1eg wrote

Bit of a stretch tbh but to each their own. He absolutely has lol but I guess I prefer THIS take to those who ride for Ye and Jesus Is King haha

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boneman429 t1_ixkwk37 wrote

Simplest measure of consistency would probably be ‘range’ i.e. best minus worst. A better measure is ‘standard deviation’ i.e. average distance from the average score. For something like this, I think I’d use a ‘control chart’ . The lower line on the control chart would be the average rating minus 2 or 3 standard deviations. Higher values of the lower line would mean consistently good

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LividBell2292 t1_ixn6tar wrote

If you have data, you're looking for standard deviation from the mean. Mean will give you the average quality, standard deviation will give you how spaced out the dataset is.

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dalastguyinline t1_ixk7rwm wrote

I guess compare whole body of work released. Then rate studs to duds. My money is on Paganini

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JaymesGrl t1_ixkf19a wrote

There's consistency of critical acclaim and consistency in a signature sound across all releases. I assume it's the former you want in which case the measuring has already been done for you by hundreds of media outlets; be it individual magazines giving top marks to every album released by an artist or a high average across multiple publications.

If however you want consistency in sound, then you either listen to that for yourself or go by recommendations and work your way from there. Slayer are very consistent. Each album is a bit different from the previous, but you still know for the most part what you're getting with a Slayer album. The opposite of this would be Metallica and I can't be bothered to type up why in full, but most of their fans will know already.

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bloodyell76 t1_ixklqwr wrote

Consistency is always delivering roughly the same quality level.

So you’d be looking for what the average ratings are, and how much deviation from that average they have. Miles Davis had several legendary albums, but also a lot of forgettable ones. He’d be fairly inconsistent, I feel. Though he also brings a problem- the longer the career the more inconsistent an artist is likely to be. So you’d need to find a way to account for that.

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shanerbaner16 t1_ixk245j wrote

Decide how consistent you think they are and there's your answer.

As far as your answer, it's basic math....add up all the ratings and divide that total by how albums/ratings they have....

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[deleted] t1_ixk347b wrote

No, youre method would have someone who had a 1 and a 9 be as consistent as someone that went 5 and 5. Which is not what you want to find out.

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shanerbaner16 t1_ixk3l8b wrote

True, but it helps finding the avg rating. Maybe find out the avg difference between each album rating. Again, simple math

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