I was crawling the web the other day and found out about Consumable by accident. Being new to all of this , I thought I would subscribe to your service just to see what it was all about. Much to my suprise I found Consumable to be insightful and well written . I do have a few questions if you have the time to answer them for me.
1) Where do you get your reviews and interviews? Do you have a staff , or are they compiled from other sources?
2) Would you consider using some kind of rating system on record reviews?
3) What are your writers backgrounds\writing histories . Have they been published ?
4) What is the criteria for regional acts that you review ? I live in the Great Lakes area and would like to see what you thought of acts that play in my area.
If the first edition that I received is any indication of issues to come, consider me a longtime reader. - T.G., Michigan (Bob responds):
First off, thanks for the kind words. The questions you ask are common ones, so it's only fair to answer them for all.
1) The reviews and interviews are done by our staff (as seen at the top of each issue), with periodic guest contributors appearing. If a writer finds a particular artist interesting, we may arrange to conduct an interview with them. If the interview goes well, we'll publish it.
2) Each writer is allowed the flexibility to choose how they want to write the review; however, we generally don't use a 10 or 5 point rating scale because it's very subjective. If you think only one or two albums have ever gotten a "5 star", it's a vastly different rating system than if someone else thinks that there are 20 or 30 albums this year that have gotten those same 5 stars. We usually include some sort of recommendation, "If you like (this artist/this music), this album would be for you."
3) Our writers have varied backgrounds. They range in age from 20 to 38, with some being in college and most having "day jobs", both white and blue collar. We have also included materials from people who work for some of the "big" paper publications, as well as people who work in the music industry, and still enjoy the challenge of writing informative reviews.
Our writers get published once every 10 days or so - in Consumable!
4) The criteria for reviewing regional acts is "If the reviewer thinks an act is outstanding, we'll review it". It almost always has to be available on disc; however, we're still very hesitant to run reviews on many of the indie/local bands that are out there. Why?
One of our main goals, when writing reviews, is to help our readers make educational and informed decisions when buying music. If a release is only available to 50 or so people in Boonsville, U.S.A., it doesn't serve much purpose to review it around the world. Don't forget, the Internet is a very powerful tool - just via our E-mail base, we have subscribers in 25 countries in 6 continents! With our limited space per issue, we just can't cover all of them.
In addition, there are plenty of them that sound awful - and we won't include a negative review of an unknown artist. That space could go to any of the other artists that DO sound good, and DO catch our ear. We'll have no problems critiquing the work of a well-known artist, and knocking them if it doesn't stand up to their past efforts; however, there's no point in doing that to a lesser-known act.
Hope this answers your questions, and that you continue to enjoy Consumable! - B.G.
