The Twitter Trolls: How to Deal with Criticism Online

It’s impossible to be liked by everyone. No matter what you say or do online you risk the potential of offending someone (or even just rubbing them the wrong way). But for a musician, writer, photographer or anyone in the creative arts it can get even worse. Your soul, your art, is on display… available for anyone to rip it to shreds.

Enter the world of The Haters. The Trolls. The Vociferous Nerds hiding in their parent’s basement behind a bag of half-eaten cheese doodles, whose job is to make everyone they encounter online feel worthless.

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What If You Owned Music Think Tank?

It’s been a few months since the Hypebot team has taken over the stewardship of Music Think Tank. In that time, we’ve published some really spectacular material along with a couple of things that did not deserve to be featured in this thoughtful forum. Along the way, we’ve learned and are (we hope) slowly improving how we do things and the quality of the content.  But now that we’ve got our bearings, it’s time to ask for feedback: If you ran Music Think Tank, how would you do things differently?

For example:

• Should we more or less selective with the articles that we publish on the home page?
• Does the current level of self-promotion in some posts bother you or is it payback for sharing their content?
• Are there additional voices that you wished were represented here?
• Are there topics that you wish we’re covered more on MTT?
• Do you listen to MTT Radio and if so, how can we improve it?
• (Your great idea here.)

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What Artists Should Know About SoundOut

You know your song is great, but is it a hit? Will it inspire listeners to share it with their friends, hand over their email address, or maybe even open their wallets? You need feedback from average music fans who have nothing to lose by being honest.

SoundOut compares your song to 50,000 others from both major labels and indies. They promise to tell you how good your track is with guaranteed 95% accuracy (I’m still trying to wrap my brain around what that means). Starting at $40, they compile the results of 80 reviews into an easy-to-read PDF report. Top rated artists are considered for additional publishing and promotional opportunities.

The head of business development invited me to try out the service for free with three 24-hour “Express Reports” (a $150 value). I used the feedback from my Jango focus group to select the best and worst tracks I recorded for my last album, along with my personal favorite, an 8-minute progressive house epic. You can download all three of my PDF reports here.

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