I like the whole fake-music-review thing. It's an unconventional choice that isn't painfully obtrusive or gimmicky. And it's surprisingly deep. The review alludes to many different stories and uses the album to tie them all together. This feels like an artifact straight from the living, breathing world of Equestria.

I'm confused about what the colors represent, so they became a distraction.

The story here is too legendary for me to need to repeat it, but for those fillies and colts out there who've been living under a rock, I'll sum it up.

Some of the patter is heavy-handed, this first sentence being the worst offender. But overall, this works well.

Having fun with the prompts there?

This is a fake review of an album by DJ-Pon3, but it is also a story, as the reviewer – in the future, past the end of the show – is trying to suss out what exactly was going on, and speculates about some behind the scene stuff. I was surprised by the pairing of Vinyl with Trixie, but the conclusion, with the note about the cellos, actually drew this together nicely and made it work better as a piece, I think.

On the whole, I think this worked well as what it was, but I think that trying to be cute about highlighting the use of prompts was a mistake.

This ended up not working for me. It’s an interesting approach, but it felt off-puttingly pretentious, and I couldn’t get a firm grasp on the context. Is it a review, a retrospective, liner notes of the thirtieth anniversary re-release, what? The colors of the tracks also have no clear meaning. I’m not sure what you were going for with this experiment, but my trial turned up negative results. Sorry.

>>Trick_Question
>>FanOfMostEverything

Red means the reviewer liked the track, and blue means they didn't like it. Notice that all the tracks the reviewer singles out as great are red, and the only track they pan is blue.

Writer, this is a refreshing change of pace from the rest of my slate, and for that I thank you. Novelty aside, this is an interesting way to frame a narrative, and I like it for the same sorts of reasons I liked Inferiority in the last pony fic contest. It's a snapshot, one pony's feelings on one artifact from the past, and while it sounds like this may not ordinarily be the sort of music I listen to, I admit I wish I could actually listen to the album.

Side note - I can't help but feel this is, at least in part, some sort of a nod to the actual brony musician SoGreatAndPowerful. Regrettably, I'm not terribly familiar with his work, and when I tried to do some research, I found that when he left the fandom he burned and salted the ground behind him. What few sources (mostly re-upload accounts) I could find feel like incomplete records at best, so I'm left with little more than a gut feeling. More's the pity; while his music wasn't usually my cup of tea, it was very well-crafted.

Final Thought: Worthy of Archiving for Posterity

I don't know what to do with this one. It feels multi-layered and defies my expectations of what a story should look like, but without more context I'm left scratching my head about how to rank it against other stories that are far less ambitious but are commensurately easier to get my arms around.

The ship-assignment is unexpected. I do like all the stuff about the cellist.

Author, I'll make you a deal: I'm going to rank this highly in exchange for you explaining what it's all about later. Sound good?

So Great And Powerful - Hm. A fake music review gimmick to imply certain historical actions by Vinyl Scratch, although the actions are not described, the situation not clarified, and the reader left to wander around trying to pick up the pieces. Seems like the author confused complexity with depth. Still, the technical work is fairly good, and there is a fair amount of creativity in it, so I can’t complain too much.

Huh. Was this whole thing an excuse to reference past over write off prompts? O.o

This is.. Odd. And clever. I'm afraid I'm not a connoisseur of music, or at least not reviews of music. I just listen to what I like. But I like the way you've woven a bit of story into the review.. The death of Vinyl's wife (Was it Octavia, or Trixie? Obviously the cello music was from Octavia... But the title... )

I'm clearly missing bits and pieces of what this story is alluding to, but despite that fact it still paints a rather interesting picture. A very interesting and clever way to narrate a story...

Okay, I've never been in music critics and such. I just don't care, and DJ Pon3 is one of the characters of the show that leaves me 100% indifferent (much like Discord) so I found this story meh. I don't know if you're trying to genuinely copy what a newspaper article about a new record would look like or if it's a joke to point out how hollow most critics sound. I agree the take on the prompt is original and creative, but for me that's about all I have to say. Sorry for that.

Interesting experiment, but trying to explore the backstory of something I'm not caring about by any means is going to fail. That, pared with the fact that the only section that created some sort of sensation in my head was the one talking about electronic music, which I don't particularly fancy, made this piece rather dull.

I’m guessing you spend as much time reading Pitchfork reviews as I do?

I really enjoyed this one. The approach was creative without feeling too gimmicky, and I loved how it attempted to tell the story of an entire life within the small word limit.

If I did have to criticize something, it’s that I can definitely understand why some readers found this to be pretentious – some of the descriptions are admittedly pretty out there (‘maybe you too can imagine yourself in some kind of cold chamber, particles of light zipping and bouncing off the walls’). But again, it worked for me. Goodness knows that stuff like that wouldn’t seem out of place in actual music reviews, so I think the writing style here is entirely fitting.