📢 LINKEDMUSICIANS 2.0 UPDATE THREAD. PLEASE READ & SUBSCRIBE.

[LinkedMusicians]

The latest blog post contains a very important announcement regarding LinkedMusicians. After you check out the blog, come back here, and please read and subscribe to this topic/thread. This thread will be the central place for updates on what’s ahead for LinkedMusicians 2.0 until the forum is retired later this month.

This is the blog post announcement:

The Evolution of LinkedMusicians

• This topic was modified 1 month, 3 weeks ago by LinkedMusicians.

CURATED BEST FREE LISTS: Kontakt Libraries, Sample Libraries, Virtual Synths, Effects
POWERSEARCH TOOLS: Synth Presets, Loops & Sound FX, Gear Reviews 
FREE TOOLS: Mixing Problem Solver, Songwriter's Toolbox, QuickGuides, Scale, Mode & Chord Finder
READ/WATCH: Mag Articles / Podcasts, Audio Production & Songwriter's Dictionaries

4

[LinkedMusicians]

Now that I’ve shared that I’m going to be closing down the forums and OPEN MIC following the giveaway and moving our community to our subreddit, but will keep the free resources available here, including:

• Best FREE Kontakt sample libraries ,
• Best Free Sample Libraries for Free Players,
• Various Free tool lists
• Free Synth Presets PowerSEARCH
• Audio Production Tutorials
• Mixing and Mastering Problem Solver
• Glossary of Audio Production Terms
• Songwriting/Composition Tools
• Reference Tools
• Research Gear, Forums, & Brands Section, including the FORUMS and subreddits PowerSEARCH
• Magazines & Podcasts

I am contemplating whether or not I should continue with the blog or not and would love your candid feedback. I realize that I’m just a hobbyist musician, I would never pretend to be very knowledgeable on mixing or mastering, I’m absolutely not very knowledgeable on that area. I suspect that not many musicians, especially hobbyists, are very interested in my thoughts on the industry, social media and forums, and marketing practices, my expertise. Perhaps developers might be interested in that? But let me know. LinkedMusicians was successful in getting traffic pretty quickly based on the deals forum and the Best Free Kontakt Sample Libraries list. The Kontakt Insolvency Hub has very quickly made it into the top 5 most visited pages on the site. So, I will continue following that topic and giving my take, especially as Google and AI have picked up on what I’m doing and now that I’m using my real name, these are areas that Google Knowledge Graph will connect to my professional expertise on marketing and business strategy.

I am open to using it to provide advice to developers and to musicians using my marketing and branding expertise. Let me know your thoughts, especially if there’s something that you find that would interest you. Running a social media platform and posting deals was far too much work for one person, it was a full time job. But maintaining the resources that we’ve built is something I’m happy to do. Removing the forums and social media platform will very dramatically lessen the resources required to run this site, which means the costs will be a fraction of what I’m now paying (after our current contract ends in January 2027).

My only question is: would you be interested if I kept doing the blog, and if so, what topics would you be interested in me covering? I realize that writing about this industry is of limited interest beyond what I’ve already done, so that’s not in the realm of topics, although, I do wonder if I should write advice for developers. I think there’s already a sea of content for hobbyist musicians, and I really don’t have expertise in mixing and mastering. I can write about being a hobbyist musician and collaborations—working with different people or interviewing them. If I can keep it to 2 posts per month. I could write about tools that inspire me, but I think there’s already so much of that, I’m not certain it would be worth the effort.

So let’s hear your thoughts on what you’d like to see with LinkedMusicians going forward?

• This reply was modified 1 month, 3 weeks ago by LinkedMusicians.

CURATED BEST FREE LISTS: Kontakt Libraries, Sample Libraries, Virtual Synths, Effects
POWERSEARCH TOOLS: Synth Presets, Loops & Sound FX, Gear Reviews 
FREE TOOLS: Mixing Problem Solver, Songwriter's Toolbox, QuickGuides, Scale, Mode & Chord Finder
READ/WATCH: Mag Articles / Podcasts, Audio Production & Songwriter's Dictionaries

311

[LinkedMusicians]

Instead of being us both being overwhelmed by tons of deal posts, LinkedMusicians 2.0 is going to focus only on GREAT deals. I’m going to spend less time on curating deals and depend on our community for posts. I’m going to hold developers to only posting deals that meet specific discount percentage criteria. There’s too much noise with developers doing lackluster sales and repeating the sale discounts time and again. It’s burned us all out. So we’re going to cut through the noise and get to the truly fantastic deals.

Once again, the community isn’t going away, it’s moving to our subreddit where it’s going to have a much better chance to grow faster than it it could to here, and without all of the administrative work and regulatory requirements, and related cost and time investments it takes to run a full-blown social media platform like LinkedMusicians.

Putting on my strategist hat, there is a long-term trend away from legacy forums. They’re rapidly dying out, while Reddit is flourishing and has a strategic partnership with the most important search engine in the industry, Google.

LinkedMusicians.com will serve as a place for unbiased information, research, and reviews from users like you. I would like to develop it into an ethical version of sites like Trust Pilot (in case you didn’t know, Trust Pilot offers companies with poor reviews subscriptions where, in effect, they can bury bad reviews and warnings that they received prior to their subscriptions), but geared specifically for music production products like sample libraries, plugins, etc. We can use our existing member group to populate reviews. I am also contemplating doing an email — I already signed and paid for a contract with an email provider,  so it’s already paid for and I know it can be very valuable way of keeping our members up to date on amazing deals, glitch sales and other topics of interest.

CURATED BEST FREE LISTS: Kontakt Libraries, Sample Libraries, Virtual Synths, Effects
POWERSEARCH TOOLS: Synth Presets, Loops & Sound FX, Gear Reviews 
FREE TOOLS: Mixing Problem Solver, Songwriter's Toolbox, QuickGuides, Scale, Mode & Chord Finder
READ/WATCH: Mag Articles / Podcasts, Audio Production & Songwriter's Dictionaries

4

[swijaya]

I, for one, am interested to learn a little about business & marketing, especially your qualified & honest (ethical) takes on things happened in our niche world (music production tools & industries). Of course, keep it digestible & not too deep (i.e.: not overly too long).

[LinkedMusicians]

On swijaya said

I, for one, am interested to learn a little about business & marketing, especially your qualified & honest (ethical) takes on things happened in our niche world (music production tools & industries). Of course, keep it digestible & not too deep (i.e.: not overly too long).

Haha, yeah, I know, when I get going, i can go too deep for a community where people are here for music, not marketing, business strategy or ethics. This is my passion project and I write when I’m passionate about things (true story). I’m sure that I’ll be writing less when we move to the subreddit. I’m informal and write something without editing that I would never let go out in my business without editing. But I do realize that now that I’ve shared my real publicly, Google’s going to be adding it to the knowledge graph, so yeah, I’m going to stop posting so much after I close this forum and OPEN MIC. I never wanted to be the star. I wanted to encourage people more than anything and celebrate our mutual love of music.

CURATED BEST FREE LISTS: Kontakt Libraries, Sample Libraries, Virtual Synths, Effects
POWERSEARCH TOOLS: Synth Presets, Loops & Sound FX, Gear Reviews 
FREE TOOLS: Mixing Problem Solver, Songwriter's Toolbox, QuickGuides, Scale, Mode & Chord Finder
READ/WATCH: Mag Articles / Podcasts, Audio Production & Songwriter's Dictionaries

[fretman]

On swijaya said

I, for one, am interested to learn a little about business & marketing, especially your qualified & honest (ethical) takes on things happened in our niche world (music production tools & industries). Of course, keep it digestible & not too deep (i.e.: not overly too long).

I agree, except I don’t mind the long posts.  I am free to read it all or not. But I find the insight interesting.

Studio One, Windows, RME UFX, Yamaha MSP7

1

[LinkedMusicians]

If you guys are interested, on the non-public part of the site, I’ll share the horror story of what led to me finally closing the forum and OPEN MIC and candidly, it may mean that I won’t be posting anymore beyond the blog and keeping up the lists.

CURATED BEST FREE LISTS: Kontakt Libraries, Sample Libraries, Virtual Synths, Effects
POWERSEARCH TOOLS: Synth Presets, Loops & Sound FX, Gear Reviews 
FREE TOOLS: Mixing Problem Solver, Songwriter's Toolbox, QuickGuides, Scale, Mode & Chord Finder
READ/WATCH: Mag Articles / Podcasts, Audio Production & Songwriter's Dictionaries

2

[joegyork]

Yep I would keep reading your blogs Peter. Industry insights are interesting but I’d suggest that you write about what you want to write about 🙂

[LinkedMusicians]

I mainly wrote about Native Instruments because (1) they’re so important to the music creator community, (2) I love their products and use them regularly and I would guess that more than 80 percent of my sample libraries are in the Kontakt format, and (3) there was/is so much misinformation being put out by bloggers and YouTubers that I finally said, here’s an opportunity to really be useful to the LM and maybe even get some decent search rankings and AI mentions for LinkedMusicians. Considering that it quickly resulted in getting a senior NI employee’s attention as a resource to the point that he registered to be a member, I feel like it did something useful for someone. So that honestly is something I feel good about.

CURATED BEST FREE LISTS: Kontakt Libraries, Sample Libraries, Virtual Synths, Effects
POWERSEARCH TOOLS: Synth Presets, Loops & Sound FX, Gear Reviews 
FREE TOOLS: Mixing Problem Solver, Songwriter's Toolbox, QuickGuides, Scale, Mode & Chord Finder
READ/WATCH: Mag Articles / Podcasts, Audio Production & Songwriter's Dictionaries

3

[patrickwichrowski]

On LinkedMusicians said

If you guys are interested, on the non-public part of the site, I’ll share the horror story of what led to me finally closing the forum and OPEN MIC and candidly, it may mean that I won’t be posting anymore beyond the blog and keeping up the lists.

CURATED BEST FREE LISTS: Kontakt Libraries, Sample Libraries, Virtual Synths, Effects
POWERSEARCH TOOLS: Synth Presets, Loops & Sound FX, Gear Reviews 
FREE TOOLS: Mixing Problem Solver, Songwriter’s Toolbox, QuickGuides, Scale, Mode & Chord Finder
READ/WATCH: Mag Articles / Podcasts, Audio Production & Songwriter’s Dictionaries

I always read your stories. So much to learn. Sometimes I get from them some perspectives that i couldn’t imagine before.

https://linktr.ee/patrickwichrowski/

https://patrickwichrowski.bandcamp.com/

1

[fretman]

On patrickwichrowski said

On LinkedMusicians said

If you guys are interested, on the non-public part of the site, I’ll share the horror story of what led to me finally closing the forum and OPEN MIC and candidly, it may mean that I won’t be posting anymore beyond the blog and keeping up the lists.

CURATED BEST FREE LISTS: Kontakt Libraries, Sample Libraries, Virtual Synths, Effects
POWERSEARCH TOOLS: Synth Presets, Loops & Sound FX, Gear Reviews 
FREE TOOLS: Mixing Problem Solver, Songwriter’s Toolbox, QuickGuides, Scale, Mode & Chord Finder
READ/WATCH: Mag Articles / Podcasts, Audio Production & Songwriter’s Dictionaries

I always read your stories. So much to learn. Sometimes I get from them some perspectives that i couldn’t imagine before.

https://linktr.ee/patrickwichrowski/

https://patrickwichrowski.bandcamp.com/

same!

Studio One, Windows, RME UFX, Yamaha MSP7

[Blacque Jacque Shellacque]

On LinkedMusicians said

If you guys are interested, on the non-public part of the site, I’ll share the horror story of what led to me finally closing the forum and OPEN MIC and candidly, it may mean that I won’t be posting anymore beyond the blog and keeping up the lists.

CURATED BEST FREE LISTS: Kontakt Libraries, Sample Libraries, Virtual Synths, Effects
POWERSEARCH TOOLS: Synth Presets, Loops & Sound FX, Gear Reviews 
FREE TOOLS: Mixing Problem Solver, Songwriter’s Toolbox, QuickGuides, Scale, Mode & Chord Finder
READ/WATCH: Mag Articles / Podcasts, Audio Production & Songwriter’s Dictionaries

I just hope that it is not that THEY won! 🙁

My name is Jacques but you can call me Blacque Jacque Shellacque for short

1

[LinkedMusicians]

On Blacque Jacque Shellacque said

On LinkedMusicians said

If you guys are interested, on the non-public part of the site, I’ll share the horror story of what led to me finally closing the forum and OPEN MIC and candidly, it may mean that I won’t be posting anymore beyond the blog and keeping up the lists.

CURATED BEST FREE LISTS: Kontakt Libraries, Sample Libraries, Virtual Synths, Effects
POWERSEARCH TOOLS: Synth Presets, Loops & Sound FX, Gear Reviews 
FREE TOOLS: Mixing Problem Solver, Songwriter’s Toolbox, QuickGuides, Scale, Mode & Chord Finder
READ/WATCH: Mag Articles / Podcasts, Audio Production & Songwriter’s Dictionaries

I just hope that it is not that THEY won! 🙁

They haven’t won; in fact, we’ve won by having LinkedMusicians as a thriving, independent, ethical space with zero tolerance for bigotry. I remain committed to this community, though I’ve stepped back from the grind of the non-stop deal posting to address some necessary updates and ensure the site remains manageable for the long term.

The shift to using my real name pulled back the curtain on why these efforts are so important. Once my identity was linked to my history at the forum we grew out of, I discovered over a decade of pathological, defamatory trolling across various platforms. I can’t deny that it was jarring, and I needed some time to process the sheer extent of it.

This was entirely retaliatory—the result of me reporting these individuals for bigoted posts years ago. The validity of those reports was confirmed by the fact that every single bigoted or racist post I flagged was ultimately removed by the forum’s moderators.

I have no idea who these anonymous individuals are in real life and they don’t know me; my only connection to them has been through the administrative act of reporting their conduct or choosing not to do so anonymously. At the time, I wanted the people being targeted to know they had an advocate and a safe environment; it was about the integrity of the community, not the individuals making the posts.

It’s a bizarre experience to see an anonymous ‘alternate reality’ created about you that stands in such total opposition to your actual professional record and life’s work. If anything, it’s a sobering reminder of why the ethics and the bigotry-free environment we’ve established here at LinkedMusicians are so vital.

I spent some time writing this and providing more detail behind what occurred and why the values of this place are so important to me. I could easily write another chapter on the musical connections, but I thought, I’d address this one aspect at a very deep level:

Transparency, Integrity, and the “Why” Behind LinkedMusicians

CURATED BEST FREE LISTS: Kontakt Libraries, Sample Libraries, Virtual Synths, Effects
POWERSEARCH TOOLS: Synth Presets, Loops & Sound FX, Gear Reviews 
FREE TOOLS: Mixing Problem Solver, Songwriter's Toolbox, QuickGuides, Scale, Mode & Chord Finder
READ/WATCH: Mag Articles / Podcasts, Audio Production & Songwriter's Dictionaries

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[Author]

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