Musician and content creator Benn Jordan today announced that he’s done with making gear videos and reviews, citing ‘burnout’ from the “toxicity and drama” surrounding them.
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In his latest YouTube video, Jordan recounts starting the gear channel as a “low motivation side project to make myself speak better”, with an added bonus of potentially receiving “free gear” if he “did a good job”.
While he did eventually achieve what he’d set out to do, Jordan says that the bad actors—as small of a minority they may be— in the synth and gear community have essentially made it “not fun” to make those reviews anymore.
“I do not think that me having a different opinion than somebody about a piece of gear means that I deserve to be wiped off the planet. I don’t think that it means that I should kill myself. I don’t think that it means that this channel deserves to be hacked. I don’t think that I deserve to be doxed or contacted at my home address or through family members’ addresses,” says the man, noting that all of this is “just a tiny sliver of the bullshit that’s taken place in the last 7 months.”
“And the majority of that bullshit unfortunately comes from gear and synth spaces or people who are part of those communities.”
“And I’m done,” Jordan says. “Long story short, I’m just not cut out for the job.”
Referencing his Polyend Tracker Mini launch video back in April, Jordan says that, too, had “an equal amount of toxicity and drama surrounding it.”
“My way of dealing with that was being 100% transparent by releasing the [How Influencers Break The Law] video and then converting this channel to a nonprofit organisation so I would have no personal financial incentive for any of these product videos at all.”
At the end of the day, the musician says that he doesn’t need to make gear videos to make a living and that he’s “certainly not being paid to do it from the company directly.”
“I was only really doing it because I enjoyed it and now I don’t enjoy it anymore. I think that I was wrong in thinking that I could make content like that about music gear and not at least somewhat be an influencer — the most dreaded term ever, right?”
“I’m not going to lie — the synth and gear community can be super toxic and frankly it’s not fun to make them anymore.”
“So I’m not going to cover gear anymore,” he concludes.
In terms of exploring new gear he’s organically interested in, Jordan says that he will be limited to what he can personally afford or “what a retailer is willing to give me a discount on”.
That said, the changes will take a few weeks to see itself through as “it would be a huge dick move for me to send those [gear] back because of this little precedent that I decided to state just now.”
In the meantime, fans can look forward to a “massive research and documentary project” that Jordan and his team have been working on for the past few months: “It is the largest project that I’ve made on this platform so far,” he says.
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