Nobody ever seems to say this out loud, but if good reviews don’t lead to sales, maybe you didn’t deserve them?
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Proper Discord
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Nobody ever seems to say this out loud, but if good reviews don’t lead to sales, maybe you didn’t deserve them?
4 Comments
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Was really looking forward to reading this, so disappointed to see that it’s a video not a post – much more time-consuming for me, but presumably for you too?
Would it be helpful for me to include scripts in the posts?
Yes please – that would be great! It’s partly that listening takes longer than reading, and partly that it’s a bit anti-social to listen to videos in a shared office (and I’ve forgotten my headphones again…)
Terrific blog, by the way – thank you! Always thought-provoking, and often hilarious too.
Everyone uses reviews for their own purposes. Record companies trace the success of a recording by its sales (as you discuss in the video).
The people who are performing (who provide a good deal of the financing–either personally or by raising it from donors or foundations–for some classical labels) think of a positive review as a way of substantiating their investment of time, energy, and resources. They also think in terms of using excerpts from a good review for furthering their careers. These days it seems that performers do more marketing than record companies, though sometimes the performing musicians ARE the record company.
Reviewers fall into a few camps. There are the reviewers who want to show how much they know, and think of the review that they are writing as a way of drawing attention to themselves as reviewers. Then there are the reviewers who really don’t know what they are talking about, but they have to say something, so they use generic language to describe things that they don’t understand. Often these reviews are more laudatory than critical. There are reviewers who consider the grand canon of recordings, and they tend to compare new recordings with older recordings by the great (mostly dead) icons of the past, and often lament that newer recordings don’t measure up. There are also reviewers who feel it is important to offer information concerning why this music is important, how often it has been recorded, and if the recording is a reissue. These people write with an ear towards an informed audience of record collectors. I don’t think that record companies or recording artists like reviewers to put this kind of information in their reviews, but record collectors certainly appreciate it.
Record reviewing magazines all have their own agendas. Some require companies to take out ads in order to have reviews printed, and some keep their reviewing and their advertising components separate. You can read strikingly different reviews of the same recording in these magazines. I write for one, and I am always amused when I read reviews in the other magazines of recordings I know (or have reviewed), because the reviews in the various magazines often contradict one another.