I get a lot of requests to look at music people have written. I almost always ignore them, and when I do respond it's just to say no. I know this can be frustrating for folks, so here's a thread about why.

First, a quick aside: Some of these requests include offers to pay me for my work, but many of them don't. If you're reaching out to a stranger to ask them to perform specialized, personalized labor for you, *always offer to compensate them for their time and effort.*

Don't wait for them to quote you a rate. At the very least, actively inquire. Even better, inform them of your intended price range in advance: Even responding to messages is work, so making it clear that you value their time makes them more likely to give it.

Oh, and while we're here, do try to consider how much work you're asking for and offer appropriate compensation for it. I once got a request asking me to analyze their entire discography at $50 *per album*. No one's time is that cheap.

But in this case, even if you are gonna pay me enough to justify the time, I'm almost certainly gonna say no. Why? Well, the short answer is this: I have no pre-existing reason to believe that I will like your work.

I don't mean that in a mean way: I also have no reason to believe I won't, except that I'm a human being with a specific set of tastes and while those tastes are probably broader than average, they're still finite and a lot of stuff falls outside them.

This is a problem because, when I get these sorts of requests, they're usually actually looking for one of two things, and generally enjoying the music is a pretty important part of being able to provide either of them.

The first thing they might be looking for is advice: They want me to be their songwriting coach, to help them improve their work. And that's a very important service, but it's one that needs to be provided by someone who intimately understands your specific vision.

If you reach out to me with your best math metal track, I won't be able to tell you how to make it better because even the best math metal does very little for me. My advice for improving it for my tastes would be "Try a different style", but that is obviously not helpful.

I mean, I can probably pick up some basic flaws, or make some suggestions based on my assumptions of the intended effect, but you're going to get much better results from someone who will actually enjoy the end product you're trying to build toward.

And even if you do happen to be working in a style I like, I have no guarantee that the work *has* a specific vision. Again, I mean no disrespect, but the fact is that, like any art form, a lot of music lacks clear inspiration and direction.

If your work is just generic, cookie-cutter rock (And again, I have no reason beyond statistical probability to believe that *your* work, specifically, is or is not.) then all I can really do to help you is tell you to figure out what you're actually trying to do first.

And maybe that's enough: It's a valuable message, and one a lot of people don't think about until someone points it out to them. But I don't like the idea of putting myself in a position where I have to just tell someone, to their face, that they're bad at music.

There's people out there who are very comfortable dealing in harsh truths when necessary, and while many of them go overboard with it, it's still super helpful. But it's not me. That's not my skillset, so if that's what you need to hear I'm not the person to tell you.

And yes, it's possible that none of this applies to your work. It's possible that you're not only working in a style I like but you also have a clear, interesting artistic voice and you just need a little extra guidance to bring it all together. It's possible that I can help you.

But the odds are low, and it's a lot of work for me to even figure out if that's the case. I have to invest a lot of time into figuring out if it's worth my time, which is why I mostly reserve that service for people I'm already friends with.

I should stress here that I understand this desire, and it's a legitimate one. Songwriting coaches are a real thing, and if they're good at their jobs they can be very helpful. But it's not what I do.

The other thing people are looking for, though, is much more in my wheelhouse: Analysis. They made something that sounds good and they want to know *why*. I'm good at explaining why songs are good, so maybe I can help?

But here, the fact that I may not like it is even more relevant. I'm a firm believer in the idea that good analysis should come from a place of admiration. Even if you're analyzing flaws, it should be about the work's potential, providing a glimpse of what might have been.

The process of analysis, or at least my process of analysis, requires listening to the work a bunch of times to really get an understanding of its heart. Otherwise I'm just labeling random musical events with academic-sounding names, and that helps no one.

So the question "Why does this thing I wrote sound good?" presupposes the fact that it does, and yes, it certainly sounds good to you, but again, I have no reason to believe a priori that I will agree.

And I might! This whole thread is easy to take the wrong way, so I want to keep clarifying that this isn't a judgment on your music specifically. It's a probabilistic approximation that informs my default heuristic, that's all.

But if I don't like the music, if I find it uninteresting or I think the compositional choices don't work, what am I supposed to say here? Again, I don't want to be in a position where I have to tell people their work is bad.

This is even worse because, unlike in the last case, the request implies that they've assumed I'll think it's great. The social pressure to enjoy the work is much higher, which makes it harder to communicate that I don't. (If I don't.)

Oh god I forgot twitter had a limit on pre-written thread sizes. Rude. I'll be right back with the rest of this.

The point is, I can't really provide a good analysis of your work unless I generally enjoy your work, and again the only way to know if I do is to spend time on it.

And this brings up an important point. You may be thinking "Songs aren't that long, why not just listen to one and get a sense of if you like it before responding?" and the answer is that, sure, one song isn't very long, but it's never just one song.

I'm a public figure. I have an audience and, shockingly, a *lot* of that audience is musicians. I already get a bunch of these requests, and if I started actually doing them, I'd get even more. Some of it I'm sure I'd absolutely love, but a lot of it I probably wouldn't.

So, ultimately, this is a floodgates question. If I don't do it at all, then I keep the requests to a minimum, but if I start engaging, it becomes very difficult to stop. If I maintain a blanket policy, I miss out on some great music but save a *lot* of time.

(There's also a subgroup that wants me to not only analyze their work but make a video about it, and while I understand why you'd want that, please consider it from my perspective. I have a hard enough time getting people to click on videos for songs that are actually famous.)

And this isn't to say I have a strict policy against listening to viewers' music. The Random Scale Challenges were a lot of fun, and on my discord we have a compositions channel that I sometimes browse through.

I never comment, for roughly the reasons outlined above, but if you've posted something there, there's a non-zero chance I've heard it.

It's also not to say I'm opposed to interesting collaborations. A couple years back I got hired to animate a music video, and it was a lot of fun.

But I already spend plenty of time analyzing music. That's not a fun new adventure for me. That's just my normal job, but done in such a way that it only benefits one person instead of tens of thousands.

And that's probably a good point to wrap up with: Any time I spend analyzing your personal music is time I'm not spending doing any of my other work. That means you have to pay me, which means you have to be able to afford me, which means you have to be reasonably wealthy.

But a large part of why I made 12tone in the first place was that I wanted my work to be freely available. I wanted people who couldn't afford a music degree to be able to appreciate theory. Selling my services privately betrays my guiding philosophy.

So, sorry, but no, I probably won't look at your songs, and I definitely won't give you feedback on them unless we're actually friends. It's not because you're bad at music. It's just because I'm not the right person for the job.