spectrum pulse channel update 2022

I’ve done these ‘channel updates’ for the past few years, normally to update folks on how I’m going to recalibrate my channels for the year ahead, try new things, figure out where and how I’m going to experiment. Normally it’s pretty upbeat too - optimistic, hopeful for the future, lots of new plans and experiments that I want to test and explore, all the big positives from the year behind and looking ahead.

So this might come across as more confrontational - I hate that by its very nature that’ll make some think that it’s more honest, but truth be told, it’s more revealing of what I’ve been on the cusp of for a while, especially given that in some of these cases, I’ve only accumulated a little more data and a little less patience. And truth be told, after the year I had I don’t want this to feel confrontational, but I also don’t want to sugar coat reality, and sometimes it makes a lot more sense to be blunt about it.

So let’s break this down: 2021 sucked. It was a marginally better year for the world, relatively speaking, but in terms of my channels it was pretty bad. And while I can point to some specific inciting incidents - the hack last October springs to mind - the larger strain was trying to find the correct balance between solo review content, On The Pulse, and other things I was curious to try. Truth be told it played out closer to that of 2020, but more frustrating - I got a few big videos out, but I was never fully able to focus on them and deliver thanks to a lot of real life stuff piling up out of frame and a sense of diminishing returns that really started to piss me off as the year went on. Or to put it in microcosm, it’s more than a little heartbreaking when you hire an editor and work for months on a video essay for which you’ve been scripting for years… and the video is overtaken in traffic and ‘discourse’ by a solo review of the newest twenty-one pilots album, my very next video.

And at this point I have the data - two years of On The Pulse has told me a lot, not just about my channel but my audience, especially when it comes to the differential between solo reviews, that series, year-end content, and other ventures. And it’s allowed me to reach a few conclusions that, hate to say it, are not surprising, but are disappointing to say the least, especially when once again I put out comfortably over 250 album reviews this year - which outside of the brief run of the Trailing Edge in 2018 and the debut of On The Pulse in 2020, comfortably outstrips any other year on my channel. The issue has never been volume of content, and the vast majority could never keep up the consistent output that I’ve had, nor would I ever expect them to. Really, my issue’s been framing and marketing that volume, and that is something in which I’m still struggling to nail the proper formula. So with that in mind…

#1: there will be more of a focus on solo reviews again. To be blunt, they drove the most traffic consistently for the past two years, even when there were bigger names in On The Pulse. Hate to say it but despite covering a wider range of acts where you’d think you’d be able to garner more traffic in aggregate, YouTube has never allowed those episodes to surface in search results, so they rarely if ever drive new viewers. And that means my veto is going to be more stringent when I do put out On The Pulse, or I may chop individual segments for YouTube shorts or TikTok or IGTV - either way, that series needs to be tinkered with, and I have to be honest, I felt way more inspired when I had a solo album review with a lot to say than churning out On The Pulse segments for forgettable projects where you put in a ton of legwork in terms of research and back catalog exploration and they went broadly underappreciated. Speaking of which…

#2 - it became broadly apparent that there’s a whole segment of my audience that only cares to hear me talk about the big artists, and that’s it. I saw it when I gave glowing solo reviews to indie acts and nobody watched the reviews, and I saw it whenever I didn’t put up timestamps in On The Pulse, you’d have people drop comments asking where they were. And when I go in to check the data, you can pinpoint the spikes when people jump to specific reviews - which kind of defeats the goddamn purpose of an aggregate series where I’m trying to expose people to more music. Even in a few of the genre specific episodes people would jump around to the ones they know, even if I didn’t care for them as much - which of course puts the lie to people being so open-minded when they want to discover new music when instead they’re looking for validation of opinions they already had, but it flies in the face of any curator role that a modern online music critic would want. Because I’m doing all the work of curation, and the majority don’t seem to care - and it’s not even a score thing because by now y’all should know when I’m doing a big solo review it’s either because I love it, I hate it, or I have a lot to say, and that’s normally evident by the thumbnail, so it’s not just buzzing to find the big reactions positive or negative. In all due honesty, I should have recognized this more clearly when I did Resonators for two years and folks only chose to watch the most recognizable names if that. And there’s a part of me that feels like some of this is on me: when you’re a critic more emphasis is placed on opinion and not pure observation or history, which will alienate the folks who are just coming to find and enjoy new music and don’t want any evaluation that could puncture their own enjoyment - validation becomes more rewarding. And hey, it’s a space in which a lot of reaction channels and surface level essay channels operate - I can’t knock their hustle, they’ve got their audience… but I also believe a well-articulated and contextualized opinion can expand and deepen one’s musical experience, and I don’t want to get away from that. That said…

#3 - I’m getting rid of scores for any album reviews going forward. Here’s a secret that all critics know but don’t bring up because it can come across in poor taste: any sort of grading of a project, even with the weight of history or a catalog or a name behind it, only has as much value as the critic gives it, and in the majority of cases, critics are doing it as a favour to the audience. In some cases you’ll have folks who can effectively clickbait with their scores - the yellow and red flannel spring to mind - but in all due fairness, if you’re boiling complex opinions around art down to a number, you’re inevitably going to incite a load of hierarchical bullshit by the pedantic and truly insufferable who’ll place all the emphasis on score and none on content. And at this point, I’m thoroughly sick of it - I might use scores for personal logging on other sites, and if an artist wants a score to include in their publicity material by all means reach out and I’ll provide something, but I’m done putting them in my videos - part of this is placing some faith in the audience that you actually listen to what I’m saying and won’t simply rely on a numerical score to check out an album, but again, when I have years of data that proves the majority only goes for names and not scores - as I’ve proven with the indie acts I’ve given 9/10 where the majority don’t care to watch - it’s not worth my time to indulge that favour anymore. Hell, if anything this is a return to my roots when I didn’t attach scores to my reviews at all and I felt better for it - and for those of you who might feel lost because I use a lot of big words and I’m nitpicky and you might struggle to figure out whether I think an album is good or bad, maybe it’s worth your time to give the project a chance; we live in an era where damn near everything is available on a streaming platform for free including YouTube, maybe it’s worth finding out for yourself if you’re intrigued by the snippets you hear. Or maybe come to the stark realization that if all your music taste comprises the shoddy appropriations and approximations of other people’s opinions or the aggregations of major publications or RateYourMusic to make yourself seem cool, I’m not sure that helps anyone long term.

#4 - All of this means is that there will likely be slightly fewer albums reviewed throughout the course of the year - On The Pulse might be a little less frequent, although likely more than monthly - and that means I’ll actually have some of the time to stay on top of current releases, or work on bigger projects that I constantly promise but then I have to look at my backlog and wince. That means on Patreon I’m going to be more active with my veto - again, after as many times as I’ve brought this up, a whole lot of you take advantage of my good nature there and then try to blow it off as no big deal, which I find just offensive as all hell when I put the work in - and part of that means I want to focus on more things I want to do. I’d love to make more retro year-end lists - they’re a lot of work but they’re a lot of fun to make, and they draw great traffic! I’d love to do more video essays, maybe actually catch some fragment of virality - I’ve been working on one surrounding vinyl and audiophiles that I think opens up a lot of doors and could spark some great conversation. And who knows what else could spring from that - the tagline is music, movies, art and culture and I’d like to have the time to see a broader spread.

And of course, I want to see the channel grow. One of the most truly heartwarming things that happened to me in 2021 was seeing my audience come back after the hack - the channel has now returned to its former size pre-hack and that shows a level of growth I would love to keep sustaining, and that means I might have to make tough decisions for said channel and I hope y’all can understand along the way. I won’t lie and say that I’m nervous that a subset of my audience is just going to leave outright when they realize I’m not attaching scores anymore, where it might demand a slightly deeper investment in the content… and that’s a risk I’m going to take for this year, and if it doesn’t work, I might bring it all back, we’ll have to see. Keep in mind I’ve been doing this for over eight years with plenty of ups and downs, while holding down a full time job along the way plus an extended weekly series on my second channel - that’s a level of comprehensive consistency few can match, and if you want to complain about “reduced output”, you can try my solo workload for a year or so and then get back to me. But I do want to stress I appreciate every bit of support, be it the Patreon backers, those who bought merch, or even just those who watch and boost on social media so even the smaller videos get traction. It’s the lifeblood of this channel and it’s kept me wanting to come back to my soapbox time and time again.

And maybe it’s just me with the desperate hope that these little experiments will pay off, but I have a really good feeling about the year ahead. 2022 is going to be better than the last year, no matter what gets thrown in my face - can’t be much more at this point, but for all of y’all to stick around… thank you all so much, and I’ll see you all very soon.