Here at Music Strive, our team of passionate musicians mostly contribute informative articles on learning, playing, choosing, upgrading and maintaining musical instruments and audio gear, based on our individual experiences as well as thorough research. We also cover things like succeeding in the music industry as a budding musician.
These articles usually don't focus on any particular product, service or brand.
Till date we have not published a single article for which we were compensated externally.
There is no sneaky brand placement in any of our published pieces. This is one of the key reasons why more than a quarter million musicians put their trust on us every month for genuine, unbiased, and straight-to-the-point actionable advice.
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What we also publish from time to time are product & service reviews, as well as buying guides (the best options for a specific use case). While the norm usually is recommending random stuff to unsuspecting readers without any first-hand experience whatsoever, we're strictly against this. If we have no clue about something, we won't talk about it on Music Strive just for the sake of additional eyeballs, period.
We only review what we've personally tested. And in our buying guides, we feature only what we've already reviewed individually or had personal experience with, whether that's just prior to writing the article or sometime in the course of our careers.
Sometimes, our readers reach out asking for buying guides on things of which there is a fair amount of variety on the market. We often don't have prior experience with every single one of those options. In such cases, prior to starting on that piece, we actually go ahead and buy every single piece of product or service that we feel we can't miss to test to ensure that the buying guide covers as much base as possible.
In extremely rare cases, we recommend something based on very limited exposure to that service or product (such as if a friend, colleague or bandmate purchases it and we get to test it out briefly). Even then, we compensate for the lack of significant first-hand experience with detailed research on the internet, mainly on music forums, to see what the prevailing user consensus is regarding that product or service. However, it's worth reiterating that we never recommend anything based on third-party consensus alone.
Our Approach
When it comes to our approach of assessing products and services, we try to be as objective as possible, but you have to understand that being 100% objective is only possible in an ideal world.
Many uninvited things inevitably come into play during our review process, including a tiny bit of personal bias, no matter how hard we try to keep it outside the gate. But then again, if we tried to eliminate 100% of that, our articles would feel entirely robotic, devoid of human preferences and emotions, which none of you would appreciate.
Diving deeper into the specifics, we love taking an unorthodox approach when covering common audio gear. For example, here's us pitting a pair of higher-end TWS earbuds with a most basic set.
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The results were truly surprising, and many people with no knowledge of either product actually chose the cheaper one after trying both.
Take another case. We were reviewing a highly popular pair of neckband earphones. Now, we constantly heard about reliability and quality-control issues related to it. To make sure that our unit wasn't an exception rather than the norm, we purchased another identical unit, and tested both for prolonged periods before becoming sure about our assessment of that product. Here's a photo of both of them, side by side.
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Lastly, we do the same when it comes to services like online plugins, softwares and even lesson programs for various instruments. Here's a screenshot from 2018 showing our purchase of the paid subscription of a popular guitar lessons platform.
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We could go on and on, but that's not the point. In the age of sneaky promotions (remember how there used to be no proper disclosures (such as: #ad) on social media promotions before the FTC cracked down on it?) and AI-generated content (and even images!), it's very hard to trust a publication (even the biggest of them are culprits to embracing AI too open-heartedly!).
When it comes to music, especially, it's probably a lifelong passion of yours and many of our readers have dedicated their entire lives on this passion. So, as fellow music enthusiasts, we understand the importance of data and advice that you can trust.
And even when you can't at first, you can easily cross-check to verify the authenticity, and thus be relieved that you landed on our nifty little passion project on music rather than a soul-less website propelled by big-brand media and their keyboard warriors with no interest in the subject.