<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div><br class=""></div><div>Hi Bob,</div><div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class=""><div class=""><p class="">Ian: I for one appreciate your incredible enthusiasm on your
blog. </p></div></div></blockquote>Thanks - I think...</div><div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class=""><div class=""><p class="">Well..... using YouTube as justification for what is
ultimately an estimated uni-dimensional statistical value doesn't
impress me. </p></div></div></blockquote><div>Can you say more about this ? The two different sources in the blog post I link to show both show the total reported number of streaming service users is (was in Q1 2021) about 500 million, and YouTube reported that 2 billion of their users consume music on the platform. So that’s a ballpark of 80% normalization as a minimum, in terms of where people are exposed to new music. (Which is the key - once someone has decided they like something they’ll do so regardless of the loudness)</div><div><br class=""></div><div>So yes there is going to be plenty of inaccuracy in those figures, but the bottom line is that YouTube vastly outweighs the dedicated music platforms. And since YouTube is entirely normalized, that makes all the quibbling about default settings, users who disable it and the actual number of users on each particular service kind of irrelevant, doesn’t it ? I mean the “real” number might be 90% or even as low as 80% perhaps but that’s still a massive proportion.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>Or have I missed something and made an embarrassing error ?</div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class=""><div class=""><p class="">What impresses me is your marketing ability. I am so
tempted to tell people that Ian Shepherd says that music platforms
are already 95% normalized! </p><p class="">9 out of 10 doctors say so, too!</p></div></div></blockquote>I think that’s an unfair comparison, “9 out of 10 doctors” is a deliberately manipulated figure, the numbers I’ve used are a genuine attempt to compare how many listeners are on each service.<br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class=""><div class=""><p class="">At least we are moving forward and thanks for the article. </p></div></div></blockquote><div>Do you know the phrase “damned with faint praise” ? I regularly get comments from major-name mastering engineers telling me everything I say about this topic is nonsense, so if all I’m doing is a great sales job on something that is actually flawed logic, maybe I won’t bother 😕</div><div><br class=""></div><div>Ian</div></div></body></html>