EDM Reviewer is Raising the Standards for EDM Journalism [Exclusive Interview]

EDM Reviewer is Raising the Standards for EDM Journalism

2/23/2019

"David has always been very supportive of my project ever since I pitched my first article to him. He's clearly extraordinarily passionate towards and immersed in the EDM community which is epitomized by the EDM Reviewer project." - Stags EDM

Tell us about your background with music and EDM leading up to the creation of EDM Reviewer.
Apart from a couple of mashups, my technical background in the EDM world when I started writing was equal to zero. That's why my reviews are mainly focused on the emotional aspect of the songs, rather than technical elements.

I discovered EDM when I was thirteen, thanks to David Guetta and his album "Nothing But The Beat." Since that moment, I've kept listening and exploring this magical world. I was always fascinated by the infinite shapes that electronic music can have, and this provided me with an endless amount of music.

Nine years later, I can declare that I obtained a deep knowledge of the EDM world and a high technical know-how thanks to many producer friends. However I have no plans to produce or DJ because it's just never interested me.

What was the spark that ignited the project and led you to go through the process of building the website and creating content for it?
I was going through a difficult time two years and half ago. I won't talk about it, but one day I was in that classic moment when you think, "What I'm doing with my life" and I decided to challenge myself and trying something new. As already said, I was a big EDM listener, and inside my mind I was reviewing and giving ratings to the new songs I was discovering every week, so I decided to open a Facebook page and write those thoughts down. So, with basic technical skills, a rather poor grasp on English, and zero social network experience, I created EDM Reviewer. I didn't care if it grew because I never thought that someone could be interested in my work. In the beginning, I just viewed it as a kind of public diary.

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We just had the chance to talk a bit with @twiigofficial! Check the exclusive interview in the bio! #twiig #mainstagemusic #w&w #bigroom #interview #edm

A post shared by EDM Reviewer â–¡â–¡ (@edmreviewerofficial) on Sep 2, 2017 at 3:05am PDT

So at first, EDM Reviewer was just a Facebook page posting song covers and a brief comment from me. In the following months, I taught myself how to use Photoshop to create my designs, improved my English, built up a team and, one year later, gained enough WordPress knowledge to create my website. At first, I was considering it just a way to store reviews, like an archive, but it became way more important.

Which songs are currently on your playlist?
Surprisingly, there isn't a lot of EDM in my personal playlist. I listen to a lot of different genres, mainly Italian and American rap, but there's a range from indie music to classical symphonies as well. Years spent listening to thousands of electronic tunes taught me to not go overboard with "work," so I keep my ear "relaxed" during the day with different genres, and in the evening I enter "work mode" and listen to the latest EDM releases. It's A bit difficult to understand, but I often had writer's blocks because I was listening to too much EDM and felt over-saturated with content. Don't ever ignore the signs of stress when you're working on a project because it'll hinder your progress.

I also have a little personal Spotify playlist with my favorite EDM songs we've reviewed, just in case and you can find it here.

How have you gone about building the EDM Reviewer team and where do you hope to take the project in the coming years?

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A post shared by EDM Reviewer â–¡â–¡ (@edmreviewerofficial) on Sep 13, 2018 at 6:00am PDT

Building a team is difficult and we've changed our structure various times. We consider ourselves a "group of friends" with a common passion in EDM, and everyone has a lot of freedom in organizing his contents, rather than a full-on publication.

I am the boss which means I organize the schedule, contact artists, listen to demos, make designs, and write some reviews. I have two fantastic writers, Sagnik and Samuel, who specialize in genres I'm not as well-versed in. There is also Soumodeep who checks grammar details, and Pablo who works on talent discovery and video editing (which we paused in the latest months, but we will surely be bringing it back soon).

We have two other writers with their independent series: Chris with the Weekly Recaps and Alex with Allax's Observatory. There are a few special guest that write reviews and collaborate with us like Jibran, Stags EDM, and Revealed Family. All in all, that's the team but it's always evolving.

As for where the project is headed, our expansion plans have been shelved for the past five months on account of my work as an intern, which takes up a lot of time during the day. In the summer, we'll resume our evolution and bring on new members to create different types of content. I created EDM Reviewer because I wanted to transform my passion into something substantive and also because I want to bring quality into the world of EDM reviews. I hope that in the next years, our hard work will be noticed by as many people as possible. We want things to change and move away from the status quo that currently exists in EDM journalism.

How do you decide which songs and albums you're going to cover?
I'll say that 70% of the reviews are of songs we find in the Internet. Every Friday we group up and look for the upcoming releases and pick what we want to write about. The rest are submitted by artists or suggested by fans.

In my opinion, having the freedom to review whatever you like, as long as it's classified under the broad umbrella of EDM, is really important. I can't be inspired if I'm analyzing something I dislike, plus we won't ever lie to my fans presenting something just because someone else paid us or ordered us to do so. Thus, I give the writers complete freedom to choose what they cover.

We are using a fantastic service that makes us possible to continue this strategy called Submithub. Through their platform, artists can submit their music for us to consider without over cluttering our email. I used to spend two hours each day responding to emails so I'm really happy with this new system. That being said, we no longer take any demos through DM, so if you're looking to be featured, you must go through Submithub. While it is a premium service, it doesn't require publications like ours to accept and publicly review submissions. This plays well with our two main principles: Fairness and Honesty.

We have a bonus question submitted by one of your writers, "Being on the active listening side of the music industry spectrum means that we, as writers, active listeners, fans, are always craving for the next thing that can satisfy our needs and expectations. Would that mean we are stuck in an endless pursuit of unreachable satisfaction, that puts us in an state of unconscious affliction?"

Damn, that's deep.

My answer is yes. I am constantly feeling "unsatisfied", but at the same time, hopeful and curious about the future. I'll call it an endless cycle, but it's natural. Humans can't be completely satisfied, it's part of our essence. Music is such a subjective thing that every person considers under a different point of view. I know people that are satisfied by listening to the same few artists for 30 years, and other people, like me, that need new music every week. The secret is to not be sad or frustrated about it because that's just how life is. You can't ever be completely happy about something, but you can simply ignore that feeling and focus on the beautiful sensations that music is capable to bring us.

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A post shared by EDM Reviewer â–¡â–¡ (@edmreviewerofficial) on Jan 2, 2019 at 1:55pm PST

Looking at the industry as a whole, how do you feel about EDM journalism at large and how do you think it'll change in the future?
One year ago I was sure that the "old" EDM blogs were going to die soon if they wouldn't change something. Nowadays everything is more informal, blogs must connect with fans and make them participate in their work, you can't just copy paste press releases and hope to gain enough interest.

The scene was cancerous, nobody really cared anymore about reviews and the few trending articles were click-bait trash about drama with the artists. It is a common thing to pay a blog and receiving a guaranteed copy-pasted review which is obviously positive. For that reason, we push our writers to be honest about the songs and pick tracks to write a negative or even neutral review one. We actually published one recently on the Hardwell and Dannic collaboration which we gave a 73 and that ended up upsetting many fans. Many people are surprised and confused to read something that doesn't suck up to the artist or label.

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We wanted to start off the new year by thanking our partners, starting with @edmreviewerofficial who was the first to believe in us and our mission. 30 recaps and reviews and 6 partnered interviews later, we're so glad to be producing content together and elevating the level of EDM journalism beyond superficial press releases and lineup announcements. Here's to another year of friendship and excellent content â–¡

A post shared by The QR Network (@theqrnetwork) on Jan 9, 2019 at 5:36am PST

Whereas before, the blog scene was populated by greedy owners, who were trying to snatch every dollar they could, things have begun to change recently. Most of the big blogs kept their usual "content" since many artists only care about the numbers and prefer working with big networks, but fans have began getting tired of that same old press release garbage. I received many messages thanking us for being different from the others, and I'm seeing growing interest towards writers that were actually creating something unique. Something that I didn't expect was to be in a position where I've been able to assist and elevate many new blogs and EDM pages that are bringing something more than videos of festivals and press releases.

Things are definitely changing when it comes to reporting on EDM. I'm very hopeful about the "new wave" of blogger that are way better and innovative with social media. Being able to make the most of these platforms is key to reaching that target audience.

A huge thank you to Davide for taking the time to answer our questions and for believing in The QR Network almost a year ago. Special thanks to Alex and Stags EDM for contributing to this interview. You can follow EDM Reviewer using the links below and be sure to check out our own Weekly Recap segment that appears on his site.