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Jeff's avatar

As someone who turned down the project (from Feb. 2020), I can tell you the things that I have an issue with:

1. Ian presented himself as a Nytimes writer to me, from his nytimes address, after he had already left the Nytimes. He presented his project as a Nytimes venture, and linked to the project AT the Nytimes, that he insinuated was one in the same. I felt like this was intentionally misleading to seem as though it was going to be a Nytimes affiliated project.

2. He never presented this project as some sort of a charity, or as something where the profit was intended to fund journalism. He presented it as a creative collaboration, one which combined journalism and images with music as an exciting new creative concept. He said that because of this, it was garnering interest from Netflix, etc.. and that's why we should be interested in participating. He didn't have money upfront because of the $50K he put into it, but the insinuation was that it definitely had monetary potential. It was NOT presented as some sort of a charitable contribution to a worthy journalistic cause, regardless of how he presents it in his FAQ currently.

3. He DID mislead about the fact that Synestesia was himself. In his email, he talks about how "we are working with Synesthesia Media on this." Meaning what? Ian is working with Ian on this? Now, I was able to see in a later, more detailed email, that money going to Synesthesia was money going to him because they put "ian" in parenthesis in a payout section, but he did obfuscate and make Synesthesia out to be a totally different label from himself. Whether it's NOW on his imdb page or not is irrelevant.

4. Lastly, while he did talk about working with a lot of musicians, which turned me off, I would NEVER suspect that it would be something like 450 musicians and 2000 tracks in 1 year. That is the most blatant part of this whole thing. It's obviously more of a stream farm at that point. If you can point to any other "compilation" or "project" like that, where one person has 50% of the writer credit for each track simply for providing field recordings, I'd love to see it.

While I dismissed the thing outright for not providing upfront compensation, it DEFINITELY was not a normal pitch. I'm not saying it was illegal, but "scam" is not a legal term. You can easily call something like this scammy for the intentional obfuscation. And just because something isn't illegal, it can be a worthy topic of conversation.

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Jeremy Arnold's avatar

Two notes:

1. I deleted a bunch of comments here (and issued bans) where there was a clear lack of interest in real engagement. While I'm happy to entertain all critical questions, however pointed, I owe no debt to trolls. In the interest of transparency though, the deleted comments were about (a) my relationship with Ian (absolutely none going into this), (b) whether I have some kind of class interest to side with journalists (literally the opposite of what this newsletter does), (c) whether I under-represented the artists (I had *extensive* conversations with Benn and others, and made several public offers to work in their POVs and emails as I went), (d) that it was unprofessional of me to not try to find evidence for whether Ian referred to himself as an active NYT reporter after he'd left them (I stand by my commentary there; though note that I was happy to edit in the first example that someone showed me of Ian doing so, and even gave a $25 donation to the preferred charity of the person who flagged it to me). Anyway, I remain happy to answer additional concrete questions on those and other related topics. Just no to active trolling.

2. I'm working on a sequel that will go into more depth on the financials and some other FAQ / side criticisms that came out of the original. Ian and his staff/lawyers/accountants have been cooperating. Just taking time to sort it all out. Hopefully before the new year.

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