Reviews and sponsorship

Manufacturer input#

I am not a review channel. I get a steady stream of emails from companies offering free products or thousands of dollars to promote them, and I ignore more or less all of it. When companies loan or give me stuff for review, on the rare occassions I actually make a review, I will sometimes send them the video in advance of releasing it to makes sure they are not horrified by it - MOTU saw my 10pre review before I clicked publish, and just said "cool, go ahead". With the HEDD d1 review, I just published the video and then a few days later emailed said "oh yeah, here's the video by the way, it already has 20k views". I don't have any hard rule against allowing the manufacturer to see the content before hand but if there were ever an occassion where they actually said "hey, you need to speak more positively about the product and cut that negative bit out" etc, I would obviously drop the collaboration rather than compying like an unethical little worm.

This is the reason I have never worked a normal job longer than a few weeks. I'm exceptionally bad at complying with orders I don't believe in. It runs through my mastering work too. If someone wants something I don't think sounds good, I will give two versions - blue and red. Blue is what he wants and red is what I think is better. I've never been a yes man and I'd rather lose a deal than become one.

I accepted one sponsorship deal for a height-adjustable desk frame, because I had bought the same product with my own money years earlier and was about to buy another. In the video I said my old two-leg one wobbles, and that the people who pretend it doesn't are lying, at least about that older model. You can make it wobble with one finger. If the sponsor had told me to cut that, the deal would have fallen through and I would have paid for the legs.

A sponsor can pay for the time it takes to make a video, but not for my opinion in it.

Silent returns#

Over a couple of years I was sent multiple pairs of expensive headphones, some much more expensive than the pair I eventually reviewed, and none of them made it into a video because none of them could replace what I was already using. In these cases I deemed it best to silently return the products rather than turning to social media and loudly publishing negative reviews bashing the products. This introduces a species of bias I am aware of: I select for positive reviews and underrepresent negative reviews. But the thing is, without always bashing specific products (unless it's Behringer) I routinely call many things crap. So if you are disappointed by my lack of negativity here, please be reasured that I am enthusiastically negative about all planar magnetic headphones, all headphone EQ software, all clipper plugins, all small ported monitors for studio use, all excessively priced DACs, audio interfaces, cables, microphones and summing mixers. And I am especially negative about Microsoft Windows. If that is insufficient, I appologise and will try to be more negative in future.

Affiliate links#

Many "build a studio for $X" videos are basically affiliate catalogues. They tend to push small ported speakers and budget junk because every item is a link in the description, and they often ignore software like DAWs because there's less commonly affiliate schemes there. I have no affiliate links whatsoever, and when I recommend something, I get no money if you buy it.

People who sell clipper plugins have an interest in telling you to clip. Much of the hype relies on what buyers cannot check: the physics of speakers, vague words like "warmth", and differences nobody has blind tested.

That said, I do offer my own affiliate program to other creators, mainly for my plugins. I am not against affiliate in principle as a method of driving sales, but I just don't think it fits my channel personally because me avoiding it allows my recomendations to stand on their own without financial motivation.