Cheering Crowd

Music and the Wisdom of the Crowd

There is a theory that if you ask a crowd of people to estimate how many candies are in a jar, the average of all their guesses is likely to be closer to the correct answer than most people’s individual guess within that group. That theory has a name — the wisdom of the crowd — […]

Starship - We Built This City

Starship, We Built This City, and Musical Honesty

Every once in a while I see it: an online reference to “We Built This City,” a 1980s smash hit for Starship, now considered in most polls to be the worst song of all time. And just yesterday I saw a 2016 article that I hadn’t read before: “An Oral History of “We Built This […]

Dealing With Online Haters

The Immediacy of Opinions

They say everyone has an opinion. As a songwriter, though, you deal with an aspect of modern life that people even just 15 years ago didn’t have to deal with: how quickly an online consumer of your music will offer that opinion. It’s not just the immediacy of opinions, though. If you’re involved in the […]