u/truecrimebuff1994

I have a 5 TB drive that only sporadically shows up in finder. But it hums to life every time I plug it in.

I have a 2021 MacBook Pro running Tahoe 26.4.1. The drive is older, but again, shows up in Finder occasionally.

The drive shows up in the System Information hardware tree. But when I open disk utility, I get a "loading drives" with the loading pinwheel continually. It only goes away if I unplug my external drive. The drive is not recognized in Time Machine. I've also tried restarting finder with the drive plugged in, as well as restarting the computer with the drive plugged in.

Any insight would be helpful here. Thanks!

You all were so lovely to me on my first post last week. I know I'm not a photog, but we all work in the same space--and a lot of you for publications. Looking to see if you have any insight.

One of the toughest things I have yet to completely crack as a music journalist is the Live Nation request portal. It is a black box that nearly everyone I have spoken to–from tier 1 music journalists to large venue PR managers–can’t seem to break.

This is not about my outlet’s size and reach. We get plenty of Live Nation tours each year in venues of all sizes. The issue is the inconsistency of the deciding factors per tour or per specific show, opacity of the approvals process, and that this workflow stomps on an essential trait of a successful music reporter: establishing relationships with artist and promoter teams.

My main desire is to finally get clarity on how the approvals process really works. Why are we denied for one arena event but not the other? Why did we get a massive stadium show, but the club tour never responded? Why is the local blog with lower reach than us approved, but we weren’t? 

That last one is the one that bugs me and my editor the most. Because when an outlet smaller than us gets into major tours and we don’t, we’re left very confused about why. Is it because that tour only wants localized coverage and we’re national-focused? Or does that site's editor have a better relationship with LN’s regional office than we do? But if the national LN media team for the tour is just sending approvals to the regional office to disseminate, why would closeness to the local LN team matter in the first place? (See, it’s a rabbit hole. I could spend many more paragraphs posing hypothetical questions.) 

The workflow has been explained to me like this: for tours where Live Nation is 100% in charge of media approvals, each show is assigned a tour press team that reviews the portal requests. They then sends a list of approved outlets for a particular show to the regional LN marketing office. That regional office then sends out the approvals. On tours where LN is working in conjunction with an artist’s team, that team also gets a say in press approvals. I don't know if this is true, but this what I was told by someone I trust.

I do want to say, I don’t mind the idea of the portal. It makes sense as a way to manage requests. But it creates more questions than answers. 

In my opinion, the portal takes away the ability to rely on established industry relationships that would mitigate this. And it makes it harder to establish them. Because the artist reps, unless they have ticket allotment themselves that they can look into, will often direct me to the portal and tell me it’s out of their hands. And as far as strengthening my relationship with the local LN branch, that’s proven tricky. My interactions with our local LN press office are often curt, cursory, and very transactional, even when we’re approved. Just my personal experience.

The reverse of that is we have had firms basically tell Live Nation “Hey, these guys are cool. Let ‘em in.” But there are tours where the artist firms can’t even do that, likely based on the promoter contract. 

Now, this isn’t an all-the-time thing. We cover about 95% of the shows we want annually. But that means the ones we don’t get into really stick out to us.

This is not sour grapes. This is a puzzle I’m trying to figure out to better myself as a professional. I care to know the why so that I can have better insight for the future. “Oh, John Smith only does tier one.” “Amy Doe only wants local coverage at your stop, major coverage is in industry towns.” Fine. But I want to know that so I don’t feel like we’ve failed or are being discounted for anything other than what the tour itself wants. 

TL;DR: Asking questions to try and crack the Live Nation portal’s black box to figure out their selectivity for coverage. Why are outlets smaller than mine approved when we are not, despite getting lots of Live Nation approvals for shows in arenas, stadiums, and clubs? When PR can’t approve the coverage and Live Nation provides no feedback, it can make it hard to maintain and rely on industry relationships for access.  

One of the toughest things I have yet to completely crack as a music journalist is the Live Nation request portal. It is a black box that nearly everyone I have spoken to–from tier 1 music journalists to large venue PR managers–can’t seem to break. I'm wondering if any of my colleagues in this space have any insight.

This is not about my outlet’s size and reach. We get plenty of Live Nation tours each year in venues of all sizes. The issue is the inconsistency of the deciding factors per tour or per specific show, opacity of the approvals process, and that this workflow stomps on an essential trait of a successful music reporter: establishing relationships with artist and promoter teams.

My main desire is to finally get clarity on how the approvals process really works. Why are we denied for one arena event but not the other? Why did we get a massive stadium show, but the club tour never responded? Why is the local blog with lower reach than us approved, but we weren’t? 

That last one is the one that bugs me and my editor the most. Because when an outlet smaller than us gets into major tours and we don’t, we’re left very confused about why. Is it because that tour only wants localized coverage and we’re national-focused? Or does that site's editor have a better relationship with LN’s regional office than we do? But if the national LN media team for the tour is just sending approvals to the regional office to disseminate, why would closeness to the local LN team matter in the first place? (See, it’s a rabbit hole. I could spend many more paragraphs posing hypothetical questions.) 

The workflow has been explained to me like this: for tours where Live Nation is 100% in charge of media approvals, each show is assigned a tour press team that reviews the portal requests. They then sends a list of approved outlets for a particular show to the regional LN marketing office. That regional office then sends out the approvals. On tours where LN is working in conjunction with an artist’s team, that team also gets a say in press approvals. I don't know if this is true, but this what I was told by someone I trust.

I do want to say, I don’t mind the idea of the portal. It makes sense as a way to manage requests. But it creates more questions than answers. 

In my opinion, the portal takes away the ability to rely on established industry relationships that would mitigate this. And it makes it harder to establish them. Because the artist reps, unless they have ticket allotment themselves that they can look into, will often direct me to the portal and tell me it’s out of their hands. And as far as strengthening my relationship with the local LN branch, that’s proven tricky. My interactions with our local LN press office are often curt, cursory, and very transactional, even when we’re approved. Just my personal experience.

The reverse of that is we have had firms basically tell Live Nation “Hey, these guys are cool. Let ‘em in.” But there are tours where the artist firms can’t even do that, likely based on the promoter contract. 

Now, this isn’t an all-the-time thing. We cover about 95% of the shows we want annually. But that means the ones we don’t get into really stick out to us.

This is not sour grapes. This is a puzzle I’m trying to figure out to better myself as a professional. I care to know the why so that I can have better insight for the future. “Oh, John Smith only does tier one.” “Amy Doe only wants local coverage at your stop, major coverage is in industry towns.” Fine. But I want to know that so I don’t feel like we’ve failed or are being discounted for anything other than what the tour itself wants. 

TL;DR: Asking questions to try and crack the Live Nation portal’s black box to figure out their selectivity for coverage. Why are outlets smaller than mine approved when we are not, despite getting lots of Live Nation approvals for shows in arenas, stadiums, and clubs? When PR can’t approve the coverage and Live Nation provides no feedback, it can make it hard to maintain and rely on industry relationships for access.  

Music journalist here. One of the toughest things I have yet to completely crack is the Live Nation request portal. It is a black box that nearly everyone I have spoken to–from tier 1 music journalists to large venue PR managers–can’t seem to break. As you all are music marketers, I'm wondering if you might have insight. Feel free to delete if too far off topic.

This is not about my outlet’s size and reach. We get plenty of Live Nation tours each year in venues of all sizes. The issue is the inconsistency of the deciding factors per tour or per specific show, opacity of the approvals process, and that this workflow stomps on an essential trait of a successful music reporter: establishing relationships with artist and promoter teams.

My main desire is to finally get clarity on how the approvals process really works. Why are we denied for one arena event but not the other? Why did we get a massive stadium show, but the club tour never responded? Why is the local blog with lower reach than us approved, but we weren’t? 

That last one is the one that bugs me and my editor the most. Because when an outlet smaller than us gets into major tours and we don’t, we’re left very confused about why. Is it because that tour only wants localized coverage and we’re national-focused? Or does that site's editor have a better relationship with LN’s regional office than we do? But if the national LN media team for the tour is just sending approvals to the regional office to disseminate, why would closeness to the local LN team matter in the first place? (See, it’s a rabbit hole. I could spend many more paragraphs posing hypothetical questions.) 

The workflow has been explained to me like this: for tours where Live Nation is 100% in charge of media approvals, each show is assigned a tour press team that reviews the portal requests. They then sends a list of approved outlets for a particular show to the regional LN marketing office. That regional office then sends out the approvals. On tours where LN is working in conjunction with an artist’s team, that team also gets a say in press approvals. I don't know if this is true, but this what I was told by someone I trust.

I do want to say, I don’t mind the idea of the portal. It makes sense as a way to manage requests. But it creates more questions than answers. 

In my opinion, the portal takes away the ability to rely on established industry relationships that would mitigate this. And it makes it harder to establish them. Because the artist reps, unless they have ticket allotment themselves that they can look into, will often direct me to the portal and tell me it’s out of their hands. And as far as strengthening my relationship with the local LN branch, that’s proven tricky. My interactions with our local LN press office are often curt, cursory, and very transactional, even when we’re approved. Just my personal experience.

The reverse of that is we have had firms basically tell Live Nation “Hey, these guys are cool. Let ‘em in.” But there are tours where the artist firms can’t even do that, likely based on the promoter contract. 

Now, this isn’t an all-the-time thing. We cover about 95% of the shows we want annually. But that means the ones we don’t get into really stick out to us.

This is not sour grapes. This is a puzzle I’m trying to figure out to better myself as a professional. I care to know the why so that I can have better insight for the future. “Oh, John Smith only does tier one.” “Amy Doe only wants local coverage at your stop, major coverage is in industry towns.” Fine. But I want to know that so I don’t feel like we’ve failed or are being discounted for anything other than what the tour itself wants. 

TL;DR: Asking questions to try and crack the Live Nation portal’s black box to figure out their selectivity for coverage. Why are outlets smaller than mine approved when we are not, despite getting lots of Live Nation approvals for shows in arenas, stadiums, and clubs? When PR can’t approve the coverage and Live Nation provides no feedback, it can make it hard to maintain and rely on industry relationships for access.  

I see you all talking to each other about this on this sub from time to time, publicist to publicist. So how about from the journalist side. Should the PR have done this? Is my thinking as a journalist 'too cold' about about this?

I was pitched an event 5 times over the course of 3 weeks, for this weekend. It was something we were not interested in. Too hyper-local for our outlet. I tend to let those go without response, because I get so many pitches in a given day from publicists who don't understand that I'm simply based here, and our coverage isn't community-specific. It has to be a national tour or brand event.

The five emails I received each had different introductions. They started to sound more and more desperate. Going from, "Sharing an alert below," and offering tickets, interviews, etc; to simply, "Upcoming this weekend..."; to on the final, "Hope you can share..." The latter especially came off like this person, who I've never worked with, was struggling to get any hits. Maybe I'm reading into it, but maybe not? And on the last one she didn't offer any access or anything, it just came off as "Pretty please share!" (I get that it may have been past the time that she could grant access since it was this weekend.)

So was she doing too much? I felt like responding nicely after that fifth one, but I don't want to send the message that over-nagging is a successful tactic. Yes, you have to follow up, I 1000% get that. I'm a major follow-upper on my own requests. But bludgeoning an inbox--such that the journalist feels you're starting to beg--is over a line, IMO.

What your take? I always enjoy your perspectives.