You won’t find expert witnesses like that in “The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t.” In fact, exactly three people are quoted in Johnson’s piece: Lars Ulrich, Steve Albini, and, um, me. He doesn’t talk to people who are living and working in the film, music, and publishing industries; he tries to tell his story with only numbers, and numbers simply don’t tell the whole story. This is why he’s getting so much pushback from the creative community, particularly its music quadrant; aside from the dodginess of his stats (“crooked numbers,” according to Content Creators Coalition President Melvin Gibbs), he relies so heavily on figures over observation and experience that the entire piece amounts to, as the Future of Music Coalition so eloquently put it, “an exercise in gaslighting.”

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