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Forums › ANNOUNCEMENTS, FAQs, IDEAS, ISSUES, & FEEDBACK › LM Announcements / Site Discussion › Check Out Our Magazines & Podcasts Section. Give Your Feedback.
Have you checked out the “Magazines & Podcasts” section of the site? If not, take a look at the navigation bar on the left-hand side of the page, expand it, click on the links for Recording Production, Songwriting, and YouTube Channels and let me know what you think below.
Also, are there publications, podcasts, or YouTube channels that you would like to see added? The standards are that they must be high quality and light on shilling for developers, manufacturers, and other brands.
LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.
Check out my music.
Useful 😉
And I should have mentioned, but everything is dynamically updated. Every 3 days, it looks to see if there is new content. I’m still building more resources, but I thought I would start with some resources that I think are excellent. I’m, of course, weak on genres that I’m not involved with, and English language content. So, I would especially welcome great resources for people making music or working on music in other genres. I’m hoping it will be a convenient way for people to find great — free — learning resources and to keep up on all things related to music making.
My hope is also that it eventually leads to more discussions about the content in the forums and walls over time. I have more functionality on the way. All things that I planned out last year and are the roadmap for the site. My plans for it are far beyond it merely beyond just another forum.
LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.
Check out my music.
Something very strange happened and the page for Music Production Related Magazines disappeared. I’ll recreate it this weekend. It featured Mix Magazine, Tape Op Magazine and some others. I personally found it valuable.
LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.
Check out my music.
I put up a new page that has more resources than the original one. I’d love to get more feedback.
LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.
Check out my music.
Some additional suggestions for the page of YouTube channels
Dan Worrall https://www.youtube.com/@DanWorrall
Sonic Scoop https://www.youtube.com/@SonicScoop
Paul Third https://www.youtube.com/@PaulThird
Venus Theory https://www.youtube.com/@VenusTheory
Praise Tracks https://www.youtube.com/@PraiseTracks
Guy Michelmore https://www.youtube.com/@ThinkSpaceEducation
Alice Efe https://www.youtube.com/@Alice-Efe
Is Gear Addiction Syndrome a form of insanity? Here is my vst collection.
What is Gremlins' Music? watch or listen at Odysee
Some additional suggestions for the page of YouTube channels
Dan Worrall https://www.youtube.com/@DanWorrall
Sonic Scoop https://www.youtube.com/@SonicScoop
Paul Third https://www.youtube.com/@PaulThird
Venus Theory https://www.youtube.com/@VenusTheory
Praise Tracks https://www.youtube.com/@PraiseTracks
Guy Michelmore https://www.youtube.com/@ThinkSpaceEducation
Alice Efe https://www.youtube.com/@Alice-Efe
Is Gear Addiction Syndrome a form of insanity? Here is my vst collection.
What is Gremlins’ Music? watch or listen at Odysee
THE TL;DR VERSION
I have thought of some of those. I know a couple of those guys from having interacted with them. I’m pretty iffy about including pure influencers — that is, people whose claim to fame isn’t in their accomplishments in the industry, but is creating and selling the trust that people have in them based on Youtube videos.
THE LONGER VERSION
I have been reluctant to put up pure influencer channels. And I’ll share this. Several years ago, one of those popular influencers in that group was asking developers for $15,000 minimum in order to do a “review” of their sample libraries. Now, I like the guy, and we’ve had very positive interactions, but influencer marketing is a shady business with, I’ll just be candid, terrible ethics. It is all about gaining and selling people’s trust to the highest bidder and creating the false impression that the influencers are unbiased. It’s a con game. And the big underlying premise of this site is to give a voice to uncompensated regular users of virtual and physical gear, so people can be less reliant on influencers. I don’t know ethically, if I want this site to be a promotion channel for that when one of the compelling reasons I created the site was in response to some very unethical practices of a developer who bought a popular forum and to the rise of influencer marketing. Consider that I made my name — globally — by managing, writing, and speaking about digital marketing and ethics in marketing. And that writing came out of my actual personal ethics. I wrote what I believed in when it came to ethics. It went viral without my expecting it to. But the reason for my writing was that I truly believe strongly in what I wrote about.
So, I ‘m trying to make this site the response to influencers who are shilling products who make a lot of money from doing that shilling. I am perplexed on this area, because I realize how popular these influencers are probably with this community and I want to make this section really useful for everyone. A potential compromise might be putting up a disclaimer, describing how influencer marketing — and influencers work, differentiating them from legitimate journalist reviews. Just to give an idea of the differences; if you compare that to journalists to influencers, a journalist doing a review:
(1) Generally doesn’t keep the reviewed product as their own property after a review. [CONFLICT OF INTEREST.]
(2) isn’t paid by the company that has the product to be reviewed. [CONFLICT OF INTEREST.]
(3) Isn’t incentivized to do favorable reviews. Influencers — if popular — will ask for money from developers to review their product, then they will commonly use affiliate marketing links. The result is, the influencer makes more money the higher the sales of the reviewed product. . [CONFLICT OF INTEREST.]
(4.) Doesn’t derive income from the companies whose products are being reviewed, so the journalist doesn’t have to worry about giving a bad review; an influencer does. A bad review means the gravy train of free products, related payment from the developer, the prospect of doing paid promos for the developer (a very common in lnfuencer pitch to brands — they almost all do this pitch).
So maybe the solution is that I do a page and call it “Influencer Videos” and put a disclaimer before it that states those things. Granted, it doesn’t make influencers like me, but it educates users about the business of influencer marketing so that they can watch these videos with a good degree of understanding of the bias.
Sorry, I realize you didn’t want an article on the ethics of influencer marketing, and you did exactly what I asked for. I’m just being totally candid about my values, why I did this site, and the concerns I have about promoting an industry that is less than ethical. Again, I mostly chose channels of well established experts who started YouTube channels, not solopreneurs who started a YouTube channel to make money from brands. Yes, both groups make money from brands, but I find the experts are significantly more reliable than the pure influencers.
LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.
Check out my music.
Sheesh, you know, I actually used to be considered the funny guy in my crowd and also had a reputation for getting laughs as a public speaker. Sorry, I definitely am a very analytical person. I don’t want to suck all the fun out of this with my ideals laid out! I’m just being really candid.
So I just added Guy Michelmore and Sonic Scoop.
I’ll leave it to you guys. If enough people want me to add a page with influencers — people known primarily for being influencers, I’ll add them on a page with a caveat, something like I wrote in the above post. I want to give you guys the content you want. I just don’t want to further the influencer industry that makes a profit by earning people’s trust just to sell it to the highest bidder with faux reviews that pretend to be legit.
LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.
Check out my music.
Okay, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to create a page of Influencer YouTube Videos with the following text — this is a draft:
Influencer Videos Please be aware that while influencers always claim to be unbiased:
(1) Influencers almost always receive free products for their videos. Whereas journalist reviewers use products for review purposes, influencers treat the products they receive as their property to use as if they paid for it after their “review” has been completed.
(2) Influencers with a sizable following commonly demand compensation for doing an influencer “review.” Some of the popular influencers in this space request upwards of $15,000 US per video “review.” This, of course, creates a conflict of interest, where the influencer is unlikely to give a poor review if it ends the relationship with the developer/brand. In the US, and most other countries, influencers are legally required to disclose any compensation received upfront in their videos. 99.99% of them comply with these regulations and laws. Influencers who even receive products for free in exchange for doing a video, are required by regulations in the US, and laws in many other countries, to disclose that information. They rarely do.
(3) Influencers also have a bias to give more favorable reviews due to affiliate marketing relationships with the developers and brands whose products and services they review. A positive review generates more revenue for an influencer than a negative one.
Are all influencers dishonest? No. But there is absolutely bias whenever influencers are provided goods with a value or cash in exchange for doing a review. Just watch with an understanding of the inherent bias in influencer marketing. Be aware that influencers are part of product and service marketing and come from companies’ marketing budgets. They are very literally part of brands’ marketing and promotions plans and they operate very differently from actual journalist reviews from reputable publications.
LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.
Check out my music.