GameDaily Biz has a nice Media Coverage column entitled What Game Developers Hate About Videogame Reviewers that I think is quite relevant to folks trying to get their music and related material reviewed.

The author focuses on the complaints of game developers regarding game reviewers from the "enthusiast press", i.e. the proam space that’s getting so big online across industry categories (though it’s a bit more specific in the gaming scene).  After outlining a complaint, the author then suggests briefly how both the enthusiast press could improve and what game developers could do to address the situation in a more positive way.

For example, in the section entitled Developers hate game reviewers because they don’t understand games that are targeted for a specific audience, the author discusses How game developers can help:

Study a publication to see how they treat games targeted at your specific audience. If they generally treat them unfairly or with disdain, they really don’t need a copy from PR. Other publications specifically aimed at your target audience would be far more likely to give the product a fair shot.

Though I know that pr folks and folks pushing their own music are often stuck in a situation where they’ve got to hustle to get anybody to pay attention to their project, blanketing the space with copies of CDs to high profile online reviewers can have a negative effect.

In my case, though I generally don’t do reviews of music anymore, anyone familiar with my reviews at Hip Hop Logic as well as the writing I’ve done here, knows that I have always spoken out against guntalk and that guns are a button pushing issue for me.  Therefore, sending me a CD that features guntalk is a sure way to get a bad review that may not even address the good things about your release, especially if I’m having a bad day.

On the other hand, even though I’m not a Christian or a Muslim, I’m oddly sympathetic to hip hop from folks who forefront that aspect of their identity.  This might be a little harder to figure out from my reviews but, at Hip Hop Logic, I recall at least two reviews of Christian oriented acts that were quite positive and, more recently, I’ve been paying much more attention to Muslim oriented acts and have had positive things to say about such artists as well.

You’ll notice that, in general, I don’t criticize people for their religious beliefs, racial/ethnic backgrounds, gender, sexual preferences, geographic location and so forth.  That means that if I was reviewing CDs, I would be a good person if your act didn’t fit the predominant social paradigm (in the f*cked up nation of hip hop) but still rocked.  And, since my tastes are rather odd and eclectic, I might even become your champion if I dig what I hear when I get around to listening to it.

Of course, figuring that out might take a lot of work.  Hip Hop Logic is published via Blogger and they did not have categories as an option at the time (they still may not), so finding out what I’ve said about guns in my reviews may seem quite difficult.  However, even in those cases where a blog or website doesn’t identify reviews and has no search engine, one can use the Advanced Search tools at Google or Yahoo to search for results from a particular domain using relevant keywords.

So if you do a search on Google for guns in the domain netweed.com/hiphoplogic, you’ll discover that I’m not into guntalk and, if I agree to write about your badassss gangsta CD plastered with guns and loaded with the countless dead that litter your path, you’ve been set up!

However, I’m going to try to do a better job here at ProHipHop of letting people know where I’m coming from when I ask for information, since I’m quite aware of this dynamic.

Figuring out who cares about what is time consuming, just as is building relationships with music reviewers.  The artists and pr operatives that are in it for the long haul are the ones who stand to gain the most from building a proprietary database of which reviewers, websites and publications care about what.  In fact, I’m not sure how profitable this could be, but a service that identifies those people and publications (on and offline), would be extremely useful at this point in time.

At the very least, it’s important to recognize that choosing who to send review copies to based on their Google ranking, without taking some time to figure out what kinds of music those sites tend to appreciate, is a great way to get a high profile negative review that will pop up time and time again when your name is searched.