Hi and hello, everyone. Anthony Fantano here, Internet's busiest music nerd. I hope you're doing well.

I want to jump on here quickly, do a bit of a meta video, talk about a phenomenon on the channel that apparently some people in the audience are worried about. You may have seen a few videos where I look a little bit different. Maybe I have some hair on my head. Maybe I'm looking a little more feminine than usual. I know it's really hard for you guys believe, but those videos are, in fact, not me at all. It's actually other people on my YouTube channel giving their opinions about the music being featured in those reviews.

And yeah, this is a change. A bit of a diversion from the previous, what, 3,000 plus reviews I've done before on my YouTube channel. Usually, the videos are just Anthony Fantano and his opinions, so I could get why this might be a bit of a shocker. So shocking, in fact, that there are people currently on my subreddit theorizing that these guest reviews are a sign of my oncoming retirement. I mean, yeah, it is true. Yeah, it is true. I do plan on retiring one day and doing other stuff.

I mean, I guess as long as my ears are working, I could theoretically just keep reviewing music forever, but I don't know if I want to. However, my bringing other people on has nothing to do with whether or not I plan on reviewing music for the rest of my life. I don't want to get into the nitty-gritty of the logistics of having on guest reviewers or if there's any hard schedule plans in the future for any of these, because as of right now, there's not. From this point forward, there could be zero guest reviews for the rest of the life of the channel. There could be 300, who knows?

I guess I just wanted to say that these videos are in no a sign of some big, scary, impending change. They have more to do with personal feelings about music and music journalism and covering music than they do anything else. I mean, it really has a lot to do with my philosophy around starting this YouTube channel to begin with. My feelings that the world of music criticism and music journalism broadly at the time was just too formal, was not very great at communicating to listeners in a direct and engaging way.

The opinions were there and the writing was there, but the discourse wasn't fully discoursing. I mean, there was discourse around music at the time, but it was mostly going on in music forum spaces and stuff like that. Meanwhile, it was more the publications and established names in the music criticism and journalism world that weren't so much a part of that discourse. They were more dictating down onto that discourse. I didn't like that. I didn't vibe with that. That wasn't my deal. I didn't come up appreciating music through those channels. I came up appreciating music having conversations with other people through arguments, through direct recommendations, through back and forths. Me hopping on to YouTube to have those more approachable conversations around music discourse and music criticism was my attempt at not changing the game, not replacing anything that came before me, just providing an alternative. That was my hope. That was my aspiration. Mission accomplished.

But simultaneously, I feel like the discourse in a way is dying again, but for a different reason. Not because you have this power dynamic between haves and have nots who are in positions of influence in the industry and those who are just your average person putting out their thoughts, their two cents online. It's different now in that there are less music critics, journalists, and reviewers, broadly across the board doing their thing because these publications, the establishment that supported this writing for years now, have mostly been hollowed out and sold off and stripped back. Countless people fired and laid off who, genuinely before those layoffs, did great work. So I figure, why not remedy that at least a little tiny, itty-bitty bit in my own way by allowing others who have different opinions than mine and different recommendations than what I would make, come on and praise an album that they think is really great.

Quick aside, though, on the Lemon Twigs review, the reason I had my friend review that is because he's a really big fan of the band. He is far more of an expert in the era of music they pull from than I am. And I knew he would kill that review, and he, in fact, did. Plus, on top of it, I thought putting a different face on that review would draw more attention to it. And at the end of the day, my goal is to draw attention and more views and more traffic and more discourse around the music the reviews are about.

The goal of my YouTube channel isn't just simply for you guys to debate my opinions. While understandably, there are people who enjoy the one person's opinion angle of my YouTube channel, I like that aspect about it. That's why I started it. Simultaneously, I feel like that format has its downside sometimes, too, because as one person, I can only have so many perspectives. I can only listen to so many albums. I can't cover everything, even if I wanted to, because I don't have time to listen to all the music I'm aware of.

And then there's a whole sea of music out there that I'm unaware of that totally flies by me, and I never hear it. No set in stone promises on this. But going forward, my hope is to use these guest reviews to bring shine to albums that are outside of my radar a bit. There are people who are wondering if these guest reviews, are they canon? Who the fuck cares? Canon to what? They're not literally my opinions coming out of my mouth. I didn't start my YouTube channel so that people could look over every single review and log dug each of them into an archive of scores and whatever the fucks.

The point is to recommend you music. I had those people on my channel because I thought they had well-thought-out opinions on albums they were excited about. And I, personally, am still very much excited about the music, the new music that I'm hearing week in and week out, and the prospect of recommending the best of the best as I see fit to you as well.

With all that being said, though, even though these guest reviews have brought up some questions and concerns, people generally seem to be enjoying them and getting quite a bit out of them, and I'm happy to see that. I think for most people, what I'm trying to do with them doesn't really need explaining, especially since the world of music opinions doesn't and shouldn't revolve around me.

Anthony Fantano, Music Reviews, Forever.