Thoughts on Loaner Gear (Patreon)

Hi all,

Today I released my video on the Roland MC-707. You can watch it here: https://youtu.be/Bkh88gZW5kI

I mention in the video that the MC-707 is on loan from Roland. I think this is the first video I've ever done with loaner gear. Roland has been pretty difficult to work with and to get my foot in the door, this is the path I chose to take. They were supremely uninterested in sending me anything to premiere or jam with on the channel, so I approached them to borrow the MC-707 because I knew some people were interested in comparing it to other grooveboxes I've featured on the channel, and I was curious too.

Getting paid for videos by the manufacture in the music tech world is a pretty contentious topic. I've had tons of conversations with people like Bo Beats, Andrew Huang, Mylar Melodies, and DivKid about our place in the industry and the value we provide to companies. Our model is too new for a lot of companies to understand, as most of them are lost in the old "send a loaner to one of the established magazines and have them review it and send it back" model.

Sonicstate, one of the most venerable publications (and YouTube channels) on gear definitely get paid for their reviews. I don't know how much of the gear they keep, but they're not doing their job for free. That's because they ride the line between old model and the new model, and they do it well. Long live synth daddy Nick.

I bring all this up because for people like me and the other aforementioned YouTube music tech people for whom this is a livelihood, getting paid somehow to promote a piece of gear on our channel is like pulling teeth. Yes, we love what we do. Yes, we love featuring gear and learning new gear. But this is a job, in that labor is provided which creates value, and like other systems that exploit labor, that value disproportionately favors the manufacturer of the gear being featured. 

I've gotten paid for a tiny, tiny fraction of the gear I've featured on the channel, and for me right now, that's fine. Up until recently, this was a hobby, not a full-time job, and I considered the gear generally payment enough, as if I didn't agree with it down the line I could sell it. 

Getting a loaner piece of gear is like adding insult to injury. I'm providing value to the viewers who were interested in the product from my perspective, but the lion's share of the value goes right back to, in the case of the MC-707, Roland. I will get a little tiny bit of ad revenue via YouTube for it, but I won't have any chance to continue to grow with the device and feature it on the channel once I've learned it in deeper and more interesting ways.

Another example: I was approached by zzounds.com, an online music gear retailer. They really wanted to work together, no strings attached, to send me loaner gear to feature on my channel. It seemed fine, so I took them up on it, and the first piece of gear I borrowed and did a video on was the Nord Drum 3p (it will be out in a few weeks).

Again, I had fun learning the piece of gear, but in the back of my head the whole time was "who the fuck cares, you're not doing this to enrich your understanding of this piece of gear, all this learning is useless, it amounts to nothing". And to an extent, that's correct. It sucks.

I may still get loaner gear from time to time on the channel for very special pieces of kit that I can't afford or can't get through the manufacturer, but from here on out it's going to be something I avoid completely. It's not fun, it feels exploitative, and it wastes time and energy I could spend making fart jokes in OP-1 videos.

Anyways, that's my rant for today. Hope you're well!

-j