If you're not a musician, you've probably never heard of GarageBand (http://garageband.com/), a site allegedly devoted to breaking new undiscovered artists and helping people find new music. As a musician, it allows you to upload songs and "purchase" reviews of your music, either explicitly with money, or via providing your services as a reviewer. If you choose the latter, you'll be required to review X number of song pairs, where X is a number between about 9 and 20 dependent upon your membership level (free or "gold").

Anyway, the whole point of receiving reviews of your music is so that your songs can climb the GarageBand charts and supposedly if you're able to get up there, good things may happen (including a record deal). There a few success stories plastered on the GarageBand home page about deals getting signed, though I can't say I've heard of any of these artists.

We (as in NoCo) have posted several songs up on GarageBand (4 since I joined), and the review system has come to really make me resent people in general. I've come to the conclusion that reviewers (who are often fellow musicians) on GarageBand generally fall into one of several categories:

Forces of Evil

Music snob: This is the person who listens to everything with a hypercritical ear and is most likely to tell you that your 64th note triplets weren't in time with their divine internal metronome. Will make generalizations about how this music sounds like everything else and has no originality. May compare you to obscure indie acts for extra hipster credibility and will usually hedge their review with "it's good, but..."

Clueless troll: Probably severely brain damaged at best, willfully malicious at worst, the most unhelpful, content devoid reviews often come from this camp. This person usually writes the bare minimum number of words required for the review to count and provides such insights as "it's not my style, so it's not good" or "I didn't like the song. Tries too hard." or "I like snack cakes." Their reviews are practically non-sequiturs with no context and almost never cite specific examples. The most feared incarnation of all evil.

The Quickie: While usually a good thing, the "quickie" in this case just wants to get in, get a review credit, and get out. Usually this person will write the bare minimum, but unlike the troll it may be positive as easily as negative. The quickie doesn't want to rock the boat or get reported so they probably rate it a 3 and write something bland such as "I really liked the way you wrote a song that has music in it with guitars" and then moves on. Even if the review seems positive, it contributes about as much to society as the methane expelled from a cow's ass.

The Sycophant: The opposite of the troll, the sycophant is easily identified by frequent use of CAPS, multiple exclamations!!!! and any Internet slang such as "OMG!!!!11" At first they seem to be just really excited about your music, but upon further examination of their other reviews, they all prove to be overly laudatory. The sycophant is typically harmless though and simply wants to avoid any conflict, or a moron, or more likely both.

Forces of Good

Average joe: The every-man veteran musician who will listen to the music objectively and hammer out a couple of decently worded sentences. May give good or bad reviews, but usually backs it up with some examples or respectable postulation. Writes a paragraph with some coherent thoughts and constructive criticism.

Thoughtful Gifted Musician (TGM): The best possible reviewer to receive, the TGM is both educated and articulate. He or she takes the time to listen to your piece and will provide several paragraphs of careful, thoughtful analysis. Sometimes this analysis is negative, but more often it is mixed. Cites specific examples of what is good and bad, and can back it up musically. Unlike the music snob, this person is not intent on proving to you how much they know, but rather interested in helping you improve your piece. The problem with this rare breed is that while they may begin their life as a TGM, after receiving about 20 moronic reviews from the forces of evil, most of them will abandon their ways (what's the point when no one else tries?) and write average joe reviews at best.

Conclusion

Alas, you can witness that the forces of good are outnumbered by the forces of evil. The easy solution is to just ignore GarageBand altogether and go about my business. But there's a small part of me that wants people to hear my music enough that it will use any avenue, including this one. As for the reviews, the professional in me wants to hear the real critiques, the narcissist in me wants to hear the praise, and the sadist in me wants to hear the unmitigated defamation.

I'd like to think the lousy reviews I receive (when I get them) are not karmic retribution, considering that both Jack and I won awards from GarageBand for our reviewing prowess. It seems more likely that the world is becoming increasingly populated with idiots that I will be forced to ignore yet whose collective will I am subservient to due to the greater influence exerted.

As a final plea to anyone who writes peer reviews for anything (this is beyond just the scope of music), remember this - a bad review is not a negative review, a bad review is one that doesn't explain its positions.