The Future of Music Coalition Responds to the “Creative Apocalypse” Story
Normally, I’d leave this kind of tweet alone, not wanting to get involved in a Someone Is Wrong On The Internet argument. But this was different. As it turns out, the Future of Music Coalition provided data to The New York Times for the Creative Apocalypse piece, and they think the NYT got the interpretation wrong.
Earlier this month, the New York Times Magazine reached out to Future of Music Coalition with regard to a forthcoming feature. We like to help out with this sort of thing, because we know that music business structures and practices can be quite complicated, and think it’s important that journalists get the facts and context as correct as possible, whatever narrative they’re advancing. Last week, fact-checkers from the magazine followed up with FMC staff. There was a good deal of back and forth as we were provided short paragraphs, and later, individual sentences, from the article and asked to verify whether they were “true.” (Unfortunately, we weren’t provided with much context.)
Alas, what ended up running was rather disappointing. NYT Magazine chose to publish without substantive change most of the things that we told them were either: a) not accurate or b) not verifiable because there is no industry consensus and the “facts” could really go either way.