Welcome to LinkedMusicians. A non-toxic community that’s all about our shared passion for making music, for creativity, and honest conversations.

Music-making-related forums can be great places for musicians, composers, producers, and audio engineers to come together and discuss the art and craft of making music and gear. But things can get in the way, like the profit motives of the companies and individuals who own those communities.

The truth is, forum owners, like social media site owner billionaires, often aren’t in it for the love of doing a forum, like those who use their forums. They’re in it for the money. Consequently, the heavy-handed types aren’t always well-suited to run a knowledge-exchanging community very close to making purchases. Even more, developer owners of these forums don’t have a great track record of letting community members freely express themselves about the topics being discussed when it’s not beneficial to their community owner’s profit motives. Greed usually wins over honest criticism when it comes to community users and developer owners of those communities. Authoritarian tendencies can emerge, censoring critics and conversations about competitors, attacking their competitors. If you’re a veteran of these forums, this is all familiar to you.

What makes LinkedMusicians different? Well, the site isn’t owned by a developer afraid of criticism and prone to censoring conversations that mention competitors or using the forum to attack competitors. The fact is, some of the most popular developer owned forums in this industry are censoring and spinning information, to hide negative facts and customer experiences about their brand and advertisers’ brands because it gets in the way of what they optimize around, profit. Just like how influencers are compensated to cash in on their followers’ trust when they give “unbiased reviews” (the common grift), many many popular developer owned forums are making sure that you don’t hear too much of the negative about their brand or their advertisers brands.

LinkedMusicians is musician-owned by a former semi-pro musician and entrepreneur who’s spent decades leading digital strategy and operations of a number of well-known brands and has provided consulting advice to far more than one hundred others; whose writing on digital marketing has been praised and recommended by Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Wharton, Vanderbilt, Northwestern, UChicago, Fast Company, Inc, and more. Recently, Money Magazine ranked his marketing, advertising, and PR job board at the top of their list as the best choices for professionals in those fields. You can call him Peter. But this community wasn’t created to be a big money maker. It’s mission is not to be bigger than KVR, or even as big as VI-Control. It’s mission is to be the friendliest community of musicians and producers and to fundamentally change the power structure of information about the tools musicians and producers use for its community. To take away the filter imposed due to financial self-interests by developer site owners and influencers and instead, enhance the power of musicians and producers to help one another and exchange knowledge in ways these other forums have no interest in doing.

We’ll accomplish this in a number of ways. some of which will occur after the community has experienced enough growth to accomplish it. To convey it simply, many musicians and producers rely on both forums and influencers to gain knowledge about music / digital audio related products and services. But both the forums and influencers have injected substantial bias — influenced by self-interests — that they’re less than reliable sources for this research. Who are the best sources? Ideally, experts that pay for products and services that are unaffiliated with those companies who provide their honest opinions. But the reality is, it’s become extremely lucrative to be an influencer or an ad-revenue driven popular forum. Both have become poor sources of objective research and unbiased opinions of products and services.

Why does are approach stand a better chance of being more honest and objective? Think of our approach as borrowing a page from how Consumer Reports and Consumer’s Union does their ratings of products, services, and brand reliability. CR polls and surveys actual users to provide a measure reflecting their experience. That is what LinkedMusicians will be doing.