"Let's talk about embedding music in reviews."
"I don't believe for one moment that it's 'all about the music' as some writers love to claim. We're doing playback commentary. No hardware no music. We work right at that interface where they meet so it's obviously a mix of the two. At the beginning of each week I typically compile a playlist of things I want to hear. That's music I want to listen to and think my audience will enjoy. So you're right, introducing them to interesting music which in passing promotes certain performers or albums is another aspect of the job. We're certainly not Pitchfork or Mojo but some casual overlap is a good thing."
"Reader polls. You've done quite a few. Do any stand out because the results really surprised you?"
"One that springs to mind was the 'MQA?' poll on YouTube. 40% asked 'what the hell is that?'. That surprised me, then simply reconfirmed who my audience is. If you've never even heard of MQA, you're clearly not inside the usual tent of audiophilia. Another poll asked how many people use one or two subwoofers with their speakers. I was surprised by how many use two and thought that obviously I had a lot of the home-theater crowd peek their heads in. I actually don't always publish poll results. It's simply a very useful feature of the YouTube platform when your channel has a sufficiently large subscriber base. I recently asked how much extra people would be prepared to pay for streaming to better compensate artists. I'm from the generation that spent a lot on CD and LP. So it surprised me that 79% aren't prepared to pay one penny more than they currently do. Maybe the audience responding was too young to remember laying out €100 or far more on physical media each month? The underlying reality is that so much digital information like YouTube and Wikipedia is free. That trains its consumers to assume that little or no time goes into producing such content. It's why I like Patreon. All I need is a small percentage of my audience to recognize the value of my content in financial terms and I'm okay. Erect a paywall and everyone would walk away. Keeping it voluntary seems to be the ticket."
"Pet peeve about the online reviewing biz in general?"
"Having marketing personnel working in the industry double-dip as reviewers without clearly stating their affiliation."
"Pet peeve about viewers/readers?"
"The assumption that I have access to everything ever made so can answer how X compares to Z. If I don't have it on hand right now, I can't comment. If last I heard it was 3 years ago, I won't comment based on hazy memory."
"Pet peeve about manufacturers?"
"Being 6 months late sending product they promised, then calling me the day after it arrived to ask what I think. If they couldn't bother to be on time, don't I now have six months before I even get to their shipment? I appreciate that things go pear-shaped especially with the current supply-chain issues. So communicate your delays. I work to a schedule. Whenever something new shows up, I usually have 3-5 things ahead of it in my queue. I may not even open your thing up until I've first cleared some of my back log. Certainly don't call me on a Saturday morning at 10:00 AM."
"Okay, we enter the pop-quiz portion of this interview. Weirdest German food you'd never heard of until you moved to Berlin?"
"Kaiserschmarrn though technically, that's probably more Austrian than German. Käsespätzle. And I recently discovered Knödel which we made the other day from a recipe."
"My mom grew up in Vienna so we grew up on Kaiserschmarrn, a scrambled pancake traditionally made with rum-soaked raisins and served with apple sauce. Knödel or dumplings come in all sizes from tennis balls to footballs. My mom used to make Serviettenknödel. That's a football-sized giant placed inside muslin cloth which gets tied into a knot. A wooden cooking spoon goes through the knot then over the rim of a big pot with boiling salt water. When that Knödel is cooked, the muslin is removed and you're left with an enormous savory sphere that'll feed a family of six. One of our favorites was Quarkknödel, a smaller sweet variant with a jam filling in the middle."
"Until I moved here, I thought quark was just a weird particle."
"How about unusual German words you learned that don't have a 100% English equivalent? Many already know Weltschmerz and Ohrwurm and Schadenfreude. How about some outliers?"
"Grief bacon. The German word is Kummerspeck so that's how it translates verbatim. It's weight gain brought on by grieving or depression. What a word. I also like spießig which in approximate English seems to become stiff or square."
"Spieß = pike or spike. That's like a chicken which got shafted in a rotisserie. The adjective meanwhile connotes bourgeois, suburban, middle-class, middle-aged and stuffy."
"Yeah, that's my Berlin neighborhood in a nutshell."
"Biggest culture shock element of your Sydney-to-Berlin relocation?"
"German fire engines and police sirens. They're amongst the loudest in the world and we hear a lot of them here in Berlin. It took me about a year to no longer feel that I woke up in a different place each morning."
"Favorite things about German culture?"
"Abroad Germany has a reputation for being super industrious but hyper regulated and controlled. At my age and stage in life, I actually enjoy how all these ordinances and regulations create such a smooth functional society where things are generally on time and clean and just work. I think it's overly idealistic to assume that an absence of regulations where anything is permissible would lead to more rather than less harmony of so many people from different places living together. So contrary to popular perceptions by outsiders who actually don't live here, I enjoy that part of the German gestalt if you will."
"Any final words of wisdom or otherwise?"
"My name is John. I'm an audio addict."
"Hello John. Welcome to Audioholics Anonymous. You're not alone. How long has it been since your last listening session?"
"Less than 24 hours."
"I see. Well, you have been a bad boy, haven't you?"
"Perhaps. But I did it for the public good."
"Well in that case, go out and do some more of it, right away."
Over & out.
