I recognize this thread is about a month old since the last post, but I haven't been on the forum for a while. One of my new years GOALS is to be on here every week....
I'd agree that critiques are the last place we should look for grammar/spelling/capitalization errors. I often think about the business model of things (as I have been entrepreneurial and interested in business workings most of my life) and I often imagine the world of a screener... you come to work, you get paid a good wage (I think Michael said in one of the taxi tv episodes screeners get $30 to $40/hour, which they are worth because of their experience/expertise) but you are probably expected to get through a certain number of songs per hour.. say there were 200 submissions, you might have only 6 hours or so to get through them all. That includes listening to the entire song (which could be 3-5 minutes), and then writing your critique, and then on to the next one. (I think it was Susan Koc or another screener who commented that Michael would "kill" them if they didn't listen to the entire song.. so even if it sucks, the screeners listen all the way thru, I believe.) So if it takes 3 minutes to listen to the song, and another 3 minutes to write your critique, that's 6 minutes/song, which is only 10 songs an hour (assuming no breaks! I'd be exhausted after a few hours). At $5/song, that's only a revenue stream of $50/hour from the submission fees, and seems hardly profitable if the screener is getting $30 to $40/hour.. there's lots of cost and overhead that would have to be paid. So, in summary, based on a back of the envelope calculation, if we are going to demand proofreading of critiques, the money would have to come from somewhere, and most likely it would require a higher submission fee. I myself would rather pay the current $5/song and perhaps have occasional errors (which I have not noticed tbh) than to pay, say $10/song, in order to get an error free critique. I do understand that those that make their living being a wordsmith might have trouble reading writings that have errors in them (just like an English teacher who can't help themselves from correcting their friends' grammar while out to dinner), but I have a huge difference in quality expectations between a quickly written critique and say, a manual for a $2000 amplifier I just purchased. The latter is a document that 1) is used multiple times and 2) once finalized, will not be changed for the duration of that model of amplifier, unless there are upgrades, etc, then often an addendum is added to the back, based on my experience. The two documents in use and expectations are as different as night and day. Just my thoughts.
Casey
Casey
Casey
