People will, I hope, always make up their own minds about what they like, dislike and choose to spend money on. That's got nothing to do with what I've been saying about reviews and reviewers.

YouTube is (or certainly can be) a further extension of vanity publishing and having a song or two on there may generate sales - but in order to find those songs someone needs to know they're there. A review can sow the seeds of curiosity in the mind of someone who has not encountered the music before, can sprinkle a little familiarity about the names of the performers or the record label and can generally do other things than a YouTube entry can. It may or may not generate sales of itself. The two things are not mutually exclusive - you can have reviews AND put up a YouTube video, and probably should.

Reviewers are always fallible, always subjective and that's probably just the way they should be. But I would still say that if we want our music to be taken seriously by the public at large then yes, folk reviews are necessary. Not just in the folk press but in the press in general. I'd love to have my albums reviewed in "The Guardian", for instance. I am fed up enough with having folk music relegated to the shadows in the media ...working with a group of 15 yr old kids recently one of them was literally sitting open-mouthed when he listened to one of my CDs. How come, he said, repeatedly, how come he'd lived 15 years on this planet and never heard this kind of music anywhere? Folk reviews clearly won't get to grips with this particular issue, but not having them can only make things worse!

Anne