[sdiy] Wakeman

[Richard Wentk]

At 10:55 01/07/2003 +0100, Paul Maddox wrote:

>FM also dont write their own reviews, nor do they do HONEST reviews.. if you
>pay to advertise with them, you'll get a good review , gauranteed..

This may be true now - I couldn't say - but it was never true when I was 
reviewing for them. In all the time I was there the only piece of mine that 
was pulled for political reasons was one where I said that Windows 9x was 
crap for music because it had weird MIDI support. (Which it did - a ten 
device limit really didn't cut it for pro use.) And that was only because 
it was sent over for vetting to one of the droids on a PC comic who knew 
exactly nothing about music technology; and thought, for whatever perverse 
reasons of his own, that M$ could do no wrong.

No one else ever leaned on me to say good/bad things about any of the other 
products I wrote about. In fact I took a lot of pleasure in being rude 
(within reason) about things I thought were crap.

In one famous instance Philips pulled their ad spend because I'd said that 
I thought DCC had no future and there was no point using it as a mastering 
format. Karl Foster who was ed then, made a point of backing me, and the 
result was FM lost no small sum of money. In another I was less than 
enthused about a Steinberg/Yamaha bundle, which also pissed off lots of 
people, but no one stopped employing as a result. You can also ask the PR 
guy hired by Seer Systems, who was so angry about some of the negative 
points I made in a review of Reality that at one point he was threatening 
legal action.

I have no idea how things are now.

Re: SOS vs FM - I'm not a huge fan of SOS from the writer's side because 
they're unprofessionally disorganised and casual with their freelance 
writers. FM do at least commission professionally and pay on time. SOS, on 
the other hand, do things like hold on to copy for months before 
printing/paying for it. Or they say 'Go for it...' for a review, and then 
give that review to someone else as well. Neither of which are a good way 
to win friends.

It's probably not a good idea to mention that according to an anonymous 
source not a million miles from their offices, the SOS readership is 
'Mostly IT types who like to play at being musicians.' ;-) I actually find 
SOS disgustingly anoraky and gear-headed most of the time. Real project 
studio types read things like AudioMedia, Resolution and perhaps PSNE. (Not 
that there's much of a market for modulars in either, but hey...)

The *real* problem with all of these mags is that they sell you on the idea 
that buying more gear will let you make better music. This, of course, is 
bullshit. Certain toys are nice to have and once you get to a certain basic 
level you can forget about the gear and get on with being creative. But the 
idea that you have to keep buying and upgrading is just plain evil, IMO.

Richard