Recent quotes:

'Emotional' reviews predict business success, new study shows: That five-star rating? It doesn't say what you think it does -- ScienceDaily

In one study, they looked at the movie industry and examined 13 years of Metacritic reviews from 2005 to 2018. Star ratings, they found, were a significant negative predictor of box office success. Emotionality, however, was a significant positive predictor. The researchers also were able to predict the success of books on Amazon using the same model based on 20 years of data from 1995 to 2015. They found that 91% of books received a positive rating (four or five stars). The average star rating was an unreliable and sometimes even negative predictor of purchases; however, greater emotionality was predictive of more sales in 93% of genres.

Frank Fairfield bows out on Facebook

One also gets pretty sick of being as mediocre a musician as I under the diligent scrutiny of all the banjo hangout bloggers in the blogosphere multiverse.

Fake Amazon Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

My book is the one in the lower right, and the the three I've outlined in red are rather interesting. Without them, I'd be in the number 9 slot. I realize that when you're not number one, other books are in front of you (well, duh), but why are three books in front of me in the Perl category about Swift, HTML, and PHP?

New musicians ignored as the web focuses on clicks

Johnston, who has written about music for Rolling Stone, The Village Voice and other publications, believes that the pressure to increase web traffic causes major music publications to churn out sensationalist outrage pieces and “celebrity coverage” of popular artists, a development she compared to “when your bagel shop starts selling frozen yogurt.” […]Johnston said she personally struggles with this trend in content creation because her interest in writing about new, unhyped artists is less profitable for publications compared to pieces covering mainstays who are “guaranteed clicks.” When Johnston wrote for The Village Voice and the pop music website Idolator, “the things that were like ‘Hey, this is a cool band…’ would never get as much traffic as a list of something or [a piece] pointing out something is bad,” she said.

Music critics lose their edge

“A critic’s voice is now someone who’s trying to speak articulately in the midst of noise,” Weingarten said. Album leaks and streaming services like Spotify have democratized the public’s access to music, Weingarten said, and this diminishes the immediacy and impact of reviews written by professionals. “By the time any of those reviews hit, you’ve heard it. You’ve made up your mind,” Weingarten said. “The whole idea of sitting down and reading eight grafs about it after all that? It’s almost like, ‘Yeah, I’ve moved on.’”

Pianist asks The Washington Post to kill a concert review (below) under the E.U.’s ‘right to be forgotten’ law

Some of the pieces, such as Chopin’s Scherzo No. 2, sounded less like light solo piano works than an attempt to rival the volume of a concerto with full orchestra. This scherzo became cartoon-like in its lurches from minutely small to very, very large. It’s not that Lazic isn’t sensitive – or profoundly gifted. […] he can do anything he wants at the keyboard, detailing chords with a jeweler’s precision, then laying little curls of notes atop a cushion of sound like diamonds nestled on velvet. […] The sheer technical ability was, at first, a delight.

Sometimes authors shouldn't read reviews. Or comment on them.

You offer no evidence to back up any of your drive-by pronouncements that I just showed were wrong. It is abundantly clear to everyone now that you really didn't read the book. If you had, you would have seen it as a breakthrough work. […]You didn't write this book; I did. Why does it bother you so much? To dislike a book because you just don't like it is one thing. But to purposefully mischaracterize what's in and then tell others, that's something else entirely.
But in the wonderfully interconnected world we live in this becomes increasingly difficult, as anybody can slap a star rating on your book and write whatever they want under its cover image. They can get basic facts wrong, invent whole theories about the book’s intentions, bandy about the words “relatable” and “likable” as the primary modes by which a book should be judged (as though the best thing a novel can do is make its reader comfortable) and you, as the person whose name is attached to it, have to pretend you aren’t really there, watching them, gagged by social code. I guess what I’m saying is that it sucks, but of course it’s also exhilarating, especially when you see a stranger who actually gets the book, who connects with it on some level, and are able to eavesdrop on them describing it. The thrill of this, of refreshing the page to see whether you’ll be wounded or praised, can become addictive, and also toxic.