A Warning Sign
I was browsing a blog written by music business "coach and consultant" Madalyn Sklar when I came across something interesting: a blog entry recommending an e-book on indie music promotion. The title of the entry was "Recommended Reading..." so I was looking forward to seeing Madalyn's comments and then following up by perhaps looking the book over myself. Here's Madalyn's review:
What does that mean? It means that if you click on the link from Ms. Sklar's site and then buy the e-book after visiting the book site, Ms. Sklar gets a paid commission. So here we have a woman who provides her services to the indie community as an expert selling out her "expert recommendation" for a quick buck. She didn't even have the decency to indicate that she didn't write the comments used in her blog entry--they were hype from the site who was paying her for each referral.
I don't know if Madalyn Sklar is any good at her job or not, but I do know that I find it hard to trust her when she claims her blog is "to help you with your music career by providing free advice, resources, and even some motivation" and instead she uses the entries to shill for a book she makes money from. Credibility is so important when judging who to pay to help nurture your career, and there are few things that will hurt a person's credibility more than the possibility that your opinion is for sale.
In this revolutionary eBook, you will discover WHO TO APPROACH TO GET YOUR MUSIC HEARD in advertising, television, and even film. You’ll discover how easy it is to get your work into the right hands. You’ll be given step by step information on how to package your material and get your music heard!My hype radar immediately went off. That didn't look like the kind of objective book review you read in a blog, even for how short it was. So I clicked over to the book's site to follow up, and check out what you find there:
In this revolutionary eBook, you will discover WHO TO APPROACH TO GET YOUR MUSIC HEARD in advertising, television, and even film. You’ll discover how easy it is to get your work into the right hands. You’ll be given step by step information on how to package your material and get your music heard!Mighty familiar, isn't it? But wait, this re-printed paragraph of hype is just the beginning. If you look at the link to the e-book site from Madalyn's blog, it looks like this: gogirls.music456.hop.clickbank.net/. That's not a direct link to the site, that's a link that goes through a paid affiliate program run by Clickbank.
What does that mean? It means that if you click on the link from Ms. Sklar's site and then buy the e-book after visiting the book site, Ms. Sklar gets a paid commission. So here we have a woman who provides her services to the indie community as an expert selling out her "expert recommendation" for a quick buck. She didn't even have the decency to indicate that she didn't write the comments used in her blog entry--they were hype from the site who was paying her for each referral.
I don't know if Madalyn Sklar is any good at her job or not, but I do know that I find it hard to trust her when she claims her blog is "to help you with your music career by providing free advice, resources, and even some motivation" and instead she uses the entries to shill for a book she makes money from. Credibility is so important when judging who to pay to help nurture your career, and there are few things that will hurt a person's credibility more than the possibility that your opinion is for sale.
