Review Policy

Dear Talented People,

We love you because you stopped mailing us unsolicited cds and decided to email us links to your stuff instead. Please keep doing that (bonus points if you’ve set up a mp3 page, a live stream or a secret youtube playlist where we can hear your whole creation). If we really need a cd we’ll let you know. And if we don’t respond to your email right away, please bear with us – we look at each and every one, we really do.

And that’s a problem: at this point in time our inbox is flooded beyond belief with stuff that just wouldn’t work here. If you’re thinking of contacting us, please take thirty seconds to read this – or even better, peek around here a little: you might find something new and exciting and you’ll get a picture of what Lucid Culture is about. The music index is here; posts on visual art are here. For theatre, film, literature, nonfiction, civil disobedience, etc. – we intend to step up our coverage of all of these areas, but please don’t send us unsolicited books or dvds, email us a link instead.

Musically speaking, about 40% of what we cover is rock, followed closely by world music, classical and new music, and jazz. Our coverage is diverse. While we closely follow live music in New York, we welcome new sounds from around the globe. In choosing what to spread the word about, many criteria factor into our decision: will our audience find it interesting? Is it smart, different, unique, innovative, entertaining, important? Would it be fun to write about? If it is, we’ll probably do it.

But if you’re Fall Out Boy’s publicist, if you want to be the next Miley Cyrus or Lady Gag, you just licensed a snippet of one of your songs to a tampon commercial, you used to be on a reality tv show and now you want to do music to extend your fifteen minutes, or you’re in a band because all the other bedheaded boys in your luxury condo building are also in bands, you’re in the wrong place. We also do not accept payment for reviews. Our opinion cannot be bought, pro or con.

For listings in our weekly NYC live music calendar, please be aware that we only list shows that are less than $40 including TicketBastard inconvenience charge, if applicable. If you want us to list your ticketed show and advance tickets are available either for face value or for a discount, please let us know where the box office is and what its hours of operation are. We don’t list shows where discounted advance tickets are only available online to credit card customers, or where all tickets are only available online. The more advance notice you give us, the better the likelihood that we’ll list your gig. In case you haven’t noticed, we don’t list events whose main component is lipsynching or prerecorded material being piped over a sound system.

Please be aware that we only publish public links, that is, URLs that anyone on the web can access without signing into a site or a VPN. And we only link to audio or video streams that are ad-free (it’s ok if the host site, i.e. youtube, vimeo, myspace, etc. has display ads, but no audio or visual advertising content in the stream or video itself, please).

Thanks for taking the time to read this!

Love,

The Lucid Culture crew