Based entirely on my own limited personal experience and the common sense that some “publicists” appear to be remarkably adept at surviving without, here are some tips on soliciting coverage from music blogs:

1) DO identify people who have written about similar artists or issues, and think about how they might cover yours.

2) DON’T find a list of “top classical music blogs” and then go through it, pasting your press release into their contact forms.

3) DO use the time you’ve saved to craft a genuinely personal pitch to your targeted bloggers.

4) DON’T write a faux-chatty intro to your formal boilerplate pitch in the hope this will fool anybody.

5) DO offer something they can’t get for themselves, like access to the artist for an interview.

6) DON’T make the writer contact you for enough information to decide if they’re even interested.

7) DO include your telephone number.

8) DON’T assume that everybody with a blog has too much time on their hands, and take a moment to consider that, if they have a lot of readers, they probably get a lot of pitches, too.

9) DO take the time to engage in a dialog, or at least look like you’ve invested 1/10th of the time you’re asking the writer to put in.

10) DON’T sit in the marketing meeting and take credit for “outreach to the blogosphere” if all you’re really going to do is spam people with irrelevant, semi-literate, stream-of-consciousness nonsense like this pitch, from a few weeks ago:

Acclaimed young guitarist [XXXX XXXXX] masters rock, jazz, classical and a little electronica in between. Why this outreach to you now? [XXXX} has stunned and amazed audiences since he first took the stage at 13 soloing with his guitar to the point reviewers now coin him "the Hendrix of this generation." A classical piece performed and recorded for NY composer [XXXX XXXXX] is touted as the most difficult composition ever played – and it was written and flawlessly executed with [XXXXX]‘s electric guitar… this as well as sold out tours in Europe, his intensely powerful and Zeppelin vibe rock band [XXXXX XXXXXX] (two months young and bookings coming in daily, debut CD “[XXXXX XXXX]” out in July), to haunting tracks from [XXXXXX]‘s discography are just a sliver of what you could share with your readers. 

This blog is perfect for communicating 1) how a dynamic rock guitarist can eloquently deliver one of the industry’s most impressive classical works, and 2) how an artist like [XXXXX] can innovate sound like no one else – no one.

Extensive print and online press, a library of audio and video tracks (“[XXXX XXXX XX XXX  XXXXX]” as mp3) as well as multiple noted quotes about [XXXXX] are available upon your interest and request.

Thank you in advance and I look forward to speaking with you about this remarkable musician.

XXXX XXXX
XXX – XXXX XXXX XXX (dot) com

- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

* Well, not all of them, obviously.

I’m spending my day trying to put together a PowerPoint presenation for a bunch of stuff that is:

1) Too complicated to put on a single slide

2) Too interdependent to put on multiple slides

and

3) Really something that we should be discussing, not something on which I should be delivering a lecture*

* That last one was too long for a bullet point. I couldn’t even do a PowerPoint slide about why this stuff shouldn’t be in PowerPoint. That’s how feeble a tool PowerPoint is for serious discourse.

It’s frustrating, so as a displacement activity I went looking for a copy of Edward Tufte’s excellent “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint” – an expertly conceived and adeptly executed attack on the glib and reductionist presentation style encouraged by Microsoft’s horribly ubiquitous slideshow application.

I couldn’t find an eBook for you to download, but I did find that some smartass has condensed the entire 28-page essay into a 16-slide presentation. That seemed like precisely the kind of sarcastic tomfoolery I would get up to, so I had to share it.

If you can read this, then the world didn’t end at the weekend. Either that, or they’ve got Internet in heaven (or, perhaps more likely, a Boingo hotspot in hell).

Let’s take a moment to remember that prophecies of doom have been a favourite of self-aggrandising charlatans, charismatic phonies and eloquent bullshitters for centuries. They can sound pretty smart, right up until their prediction gets tested. When the apocalypse fails to materialise on schedule, what’s the usual defence? “I was right about everything but the date.”

Assuming we all agree that nothing lasts forever, the key component of a prophecy of doom is its timescale. Get that wrong, and you’ve got nothing right at all. Keep adjusting it, and you’re crying “Wolf!” again and again.

Next time somebody tells you that an industry or art form is doomed, ask them when we should expect the inevitable.

If they won’t commit, they’ve got nothing to say. If they give you a date, don’t be afraid of holding them to it. It’s the only real test of their soothsaying abilities and, so far, they’ve all got it wrong. That doesn’t mean there will be no end. It just means there are better things for us to do than to sit around trying to predict it.

This has to be one of my all-time favourite comments about something I’ve written on this blog.

There was certainly something slightly hypocritical about that last post. It is itself formulaic. Regular readers probably noticed that it’s basically an article that I’ve written before. I might have added:

11) Criticise everybody else

Identify some common threads in current reporting. Describe each one in terms of the similarities between articles, ignoring their many differences. Act like this is all there is to it.

Still. This doesn’t really undermine the central proposition that a lot of arts reporting (and a lot of other reporting) is extremely formulaic.

Is that really surprising, given the extremely high output required from many professional writers?

It’s very hard to come up with 1,500 honest, true, useful words in a day, but who do you blame when the bullshit starts to creep in? Writers with deadlines? Editors under pressure to maintain sales? Readers who want to be entertained? Perhaps it’s inevitable.

It’s certainly true that writing 2,000 words a month is easier than writing 45,000 words a month*. Does that mean we shouldn’t call out bad reporting? Should we give media outlets a pass on the huge number of stories that are misleading or untrue, just because the writers are busy?

I don’t think so.

A free press is an essential part of any functioning democracy. We rely on the things we read to make important decisions about the way we live our lives, run our businesses and elect our government. It’s important.

If we’re going to make good decisions, we need good information. That, in turn, means we need to be able to tell the difference between good information and misleading waffle. That’s why I allow a blog that’s ostensibly about classical music to spend quite so much time talking about the ways we separate fact from fiction.

~

* That’s why I only write 2,000 words a month. Since nobody pays me to write this blog, I’m not under any pressure to cut corners. I can take my time. Get my facts straight. Stick to stuff I know about. That’s one of the advantages of being an amateur. I won’t claim that I write better stuff for free than anybody else writes for money. I do know, though, that I write better stuff for free than I ever did for money. Still, this isn’t about me. You can infer a weak ad-hominem challenge in the comment above: “What qualifies you to criticise us?” but where would that get us? Everybody gets out their resume, and before you know it, somebody’s asking to see a birth certificate.

1) Is X the new Y?

Pick a person. Compare them to somebody they’re not. Point out some similarities. Point out a few differences. Realise the premise is ridiculous. End with a rhetorical question about something else entirely.

2) Is X the future of Y?

Pick something that is not useful to the present of Y. Do not explore Y’s current situation in even cursory detail. Talk about X like it’s totally revolutionary. Use the word “paradigm” about five times. Avoid committing to an assessment of X’s usefulness. Get all your quotes from people who have spent their entire careers working with X, not Y. Do not look at anything else that has been hailed as the future of Y. Conclude that only time will tell.

3) The best X of all time

Take something that defies objective measurement. Find nine more of them. Rank them. Defend this ridiculous enterprise on the grounds that you’re stimulating debate.

4) It’s the end of an era

Pick somebody that just died. Compile a list of people who shared similar attributes and are also dead. Write earnestly about their work. Do not mention anyone who’s still alive. Use the expressions “never again,” “for the last time,” and “died with him.” Bonus points for getting “final curtain” into the last paragraph.

5) It’s the beginning of the end

Pick something bad that happened. Explore a hypothetical world in which this happened every day, assuming that it’s a trend that will continue indefinitely. Only seek comment from stakeholders who stand to lose from this scenario. Avoid mentioning anything good that happened recently. Defend this approach on the grounds you couldn’t find any, and balanced reporting is supposed to be easy.

6) They don’t make X like they used to

Pick an extraordinary dead person and act as if they were typical of their generation. Compare them to a set of living people selected to support the premise that all living people lack the attributes you so celebrate in the dead one.

7) Imaginary doom averted

Pick something that didn’t happen and talk about how bad it would have been if it had happened.

8) X horribly mistreated under contract with Y

Find somebody to complain about the consequences of a business arrangement that they entered into as an adult. Enhance the dramatic sense of injustice by acting as if they signed their contract for artistic reasons with no expectation of personal gain.

9) Is X relevant/elitist/overpriced/whatever?

Behaving as if this is an important question that affects the world, argue about the truth of a single absurdly reductionist statement that applies a single adjective to an entire art form.

10) X has cancelled a bunch of stuff. What does this mean for Y?

Find somebody sick. Look up their job description. Point out that each aspect of their job now needs to be done by somebody else. Act like this is insight.

Here are ten factors that are easy enough to measure, but terribly dangerous to rely upon to tell you any more than exactly what they tell you.

 1) Number of twitter followers

The number of followers you have on Twitter is a good indication of the amount of time you’ve spent on Twitter, but it’s not a good measure of your ability to influence people. If it was, Gustavo Dudamel (24,472 followers) would sell a lot more records than Anna Netrebko (1,932 followers).

2) Number of blog subscribers

Blogs acquire subscribers over time in much the same way as stones of the not-rolling variety gather moss. Those people aren’t necessarily reading your blog.

According to Google Reader, Alex Ross has 10x as many subscribers as I do. If subscriber count was proportional to readership, I’d see a huge spike in traffic every time he links to me. In fact, the links generate about as much traffic for me as I do for him, when I return the favour.

3) Number of retweets

My April 1 post was entitled “Social Media Marketing,” and lots of wannabe social media experts shared it on their Twitter feeds. For a while, the Twitter shares outnumbered the total page views, which means that not only were all these people’s followers not reading it, but they were sharing it without having read it themselves. Some of them will probably do the same with this post. Morons.

 4) Wikio ranking

Your Wikio ranking is based on little more concrete than the number of times your stuff was shared on Twitter which, we’ve just established, isn’t a good measure of anything in particular.

 5) Hits

1997 called, and they’d like their buzzword back. “Hits” means whatever you want it to. Be more specific. Items requested from the web server? Page views? Unique Users? Mention “hits” to me in a meeting, and I’ll be double-checking all your other “facts” on the assumption that you either don’t know what you’re talking about, or, worse, that you’re hoping I don’t.

6) Views on YouTube

Susan Boyle scored 100,000,000 YouTube views and sold 700,000 albums. This gives us Boyle’s Constant – 14,285 – the number of times your stuff has to be seen on YouTube before somebody will buy it.

It’s a neat theory, but a lot of people don’t even do that well. If they did, the smart money would be on a platinum first week for Rebecca Black. You don’t know who that is? Count yourself lucky. Whatever you do, don’t click here.

 7) Conversion rate

Define it clearly and then compare it to something concrete, not an arbitrary baseline. A conversion ratio depends upon so many factors that about the only useful thing you can do with it is look at how it changes over time.

8) Clicks

I don’t care how many people you sent to my shop. I care how many people bought something. All the others were just slowly driving up my bandwidth bill.

9) Impressions

You’re going to have to clarify what you mean here, because counting the number of times a picture was downloaded from a webserver will not tell you how many people saw it.

 10) Anything with “Top” in it

Why do the charts on iTunes say “Top Songs” and “Top Albums”? Simple. It’s because “Albums ranked according to a secret formula based on today’s sales and an exponentially decaying portion of historical sales” is not very catchy. It is, though, more informative. Pretty much anywhere that “Top” is used to indicate the best of something, it’s a sneaky bit of reductionism, waiting to pollute your decision-making process.

“These stats might not be perfect,” says the consultant, “but they’re the best indicators we have, so we should keep using them.”

That’s almost always total crap.

If you’re trying to find your way from Portugal to Jamaica, a map of the Pacific isn’t going to help you. It’s how Columbus found the West Indies, but he spent the rest of his life believing he’d made it to Asia, so this analogy isn’t on your side.

We’re terrified of admitting that we have no idea what we’re doing, but it’s quite liberating. Be suspicious of anybody that tells you otherwise. There’s a good chance they’re wrong, and they don’t even know it.

My last post addressed the faulty reasoning on which articles on this subject are often based. Today, I’d like to address the role of facts.

The section that particularly caught my eye was this one, about the classical record industry. Of all the things covered by the article, it’s the bit I know most about.

There are a lot of unverified, unquestioned assertions here. Some of them deal with things that are hard to check. The most we can say about them is “they haven’t been proven” or perhaps “they haven’t even been shown to be likely”. Let’s look at the numbers though. It’s easy to check numbers. They’re right or wrong.

Are these numbers are a continuation of the quote from F. Paul Driscoll, or offered as facts by the author? Either way, they’re wrong.

Page 5 of the IFPI‘s  2010 Digital Music Report says the digital music market was worth $4.6bn, or 29% of total trade revenues. That means the global recorded music industry was worth $15.9bn, not $12bn. These are wholesale numbers. Total retail numbers are almost exactly 50% higher.

The article estimates classical music’s share of the market to be 0.3%, or $36m. This is even less accurate. You have to pay to see the IFPI’s 2010 genre figures, but Music & Copyright show similar numbers here. They put classical music’s share of the global market at 5.5%, or $1.4bn retail (2009 wholesale numbers here).

5.5% of $15bn is $874.5m. Even if you accept the lower total figure of $12bn, it’s still $660m, or 18 times higher than stated in this article – and that’s wholesale. In 2009, classical music retail turnover was $1.4bn, or 38 times the value given in the article.

This is one detail from the article that I knew off the top of my head was wildly wrong, and it’s one of the easiest parts to check. How much else is total bullshit? Didn’t you people go to university? Didn’t you learn to write an essay? Didn’t anybody tell you why you cite sources? Check sources? Question things people tell you? Or did you think that none of that matters when you’re only publishing financial analysis? Do you expect people to base decisions on something this poorly researched, or is there some other point to it? What would happen if you reported Apple’s quarterly earnings or Google’s stock at 1/38th of the correct value? Do you think a disclaimer like “articles are simply the opinions of the writers” makes it ok to reproduce outright falsehoods as if they were facts?

I would genuinely be interested to know the answers to these questions.

I don’t expect everything I read to come with a bibliography, but we need to be careful what we believe – not just when we’re basing decisions on a report that is sitting in front of us, but also when we let this sort of hearsay slowly and quietly turn to “knowledge” in the backs of our minds, only to be recalled as a general idea of the state of things at some point in the future.

Further reading:

• Appeal to Popularity
• Appeal to Authority
• Post hoc Fallacy
• Problem of Induction
• Straw Man
• Gambler’s Fallacy
• Appeal to Pity
• Ad hominem