Evaluation in Online Music Reviews: How Internauts Convey Their Opinions

1 Introduction The present work about evaluation in on-line music reviews aims to investigate the way in which on-line reviewers convey information and personal opinions. The analysis is carried out on a corpus composed of reviews concerning the music albums released by the metal band “Nightwish”. The main questions which are pursued are: how do reviewers convey information and express their opinions? Do they make use of particular linguistic elements? When they write a review, do they try to write it objectively or do they clearly express their points of view and opinions about the product with the purpose to influence and manipulate the readers? Do they always express their stance politely or can they also be rude? If so, how do readers react? The reason why this topic was chosen for investigation is that nowadays the Internet is such an integral part of our society that people do almost everything with it. In particular, on the Internet one can not only seek for specific information, chat and discuss in forums and message boards, but also join virtual communities and purchase any kind of items. In the specific case of music albums, it often occurs that some modern purchasers who regularly surf the Net tend to read other purchasers' opinions before buying a CD or an mp3 file. Indeed, even before purchasing the album of their favourite band, buyers or would-be buyers tend to share their opinions and experiences about with people belonging in the devoted Internet virtual community. One way to do so is reading, writing and/or responding to already-existing reviews, which allows readers to know if a product is worth buying or not, or to what extent. Other internet users and music fans, on the other hand, just write reviews to share their opinions about a band’s album or work with other fans, and do so with the aim to contribute to the “hopefully” constructive criticism of the band. As readers may be easily influenced by these texts or can themselves influence other people, an analysis of how music fans convey their opinions and support them is deemed to be worth investigating and will be the main concern of this dissertation. The first chapter introduces of the metal band Nightwish, their biography and albums. It also provides an overview of symphonic metal, the musical genre Nightwish produce. The second chapter is divided into two parts: the first one focuses on evaluation and its main functions. Evaluation is a general term which will be dealt with different labels, coined and used by different scholars. The importance of evaluation will be pointed out to set and preserve relations between writers and readers, and how useful it is to organize the discourse. The parameters used to recognise an evaluative text will also be illustrated. The second part of the chapter, by contrast, will