Cold Takes
Opinions, left to cool.
A hot take is what you say straight away. A cold take is the same opinion after someone has gone and checked whether it's actually true. These are arguments about music that had to survive contact with evidence before they got published.
The rule
No take runs without evidence. A rant plus a number is an article. A rant on its own is a tweet.
So every piece here ends with the same block, the receipts, and it has three parts in this order every time:
Holds up
The claims with real sources behind them, cited with the method and the sample size, so you can see how much weight they'll take.
Shaky
Quoted, but weak. Small samples, wrong genre, self-reported. Named as such rather than smuggled in.
Didn't survive checking
What I believed going in that the evidence didn't back. This section is the reason to trust the other two.
That last part is the whole point. Publishing what you got wrong is the cheapest credibility there is, and almost nobody does it.