How Amateurs Destroyed the Professional Music Business 617
David Gerard writes "Here in the future, musicians and record companies complain they can't make a living any more. The problem isn't piracy — it's competition. There is too much music and too many musicians, and the amateurs are often good enough for the public. This is healthy for culture, not so much for aesthetics, and terrible for musicians. There are bands who would have trouble playing a police siren in tune, who download a cracked copy of Cubase — you know how much musicians pirate their software, VSTs and sample packs, right? — and tap in every note. There are people like me who do this. A two-hundred-quid laptop with LMMS and I suddenly have better studio equipment than I could have hired for $100/hour thirty years ago. You can do better with a proper engineer in a proper studio, but you don’t have to. And whenever quality competes with convenience, convenience wins every time. You can protest that your music is a finely-prepared steak cooked by sheer genius, and be quite correct in this, and you have trouble paying for your kitchen, your restaurant, your cow."
How is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Also... (Score:5, Insightful)
... one might note that the mainstream industry has very little appeal to people that are intellectual or at least deeply interested in the actual content of their music.
The mainstream studios that are cracking out 'hit' after 'hit' (aka: highly advertised until people like it) are producing basic melodies in C Major with 'artists' that cannot honestly perform well on stage and likely can't do their music well in a true LIVE setting.
The mainstream studios are facing REAL ARTISTS and losing. What should they expect? They think they can churn out half-assed simpleton music and not be out-competed by bedroom producers with less than 5 years experience? Please... Mainstream music is awfully easy to make. 2 or 3 basic chords. Very little elaboration or demonstration of musical mastery. Major key. Generalized/Simplified/Non-confrontational/obvious/regurgitated lyrics. Chorus-Verse-Chorus-Verse-Chorus. Except you call the 'chorus' a "HOOK" now because it's usually very simple and has a catchy jingle.
Yeah. Lame.
Full disclosure: I've been a bedroom producer for 18 years now. I have a successful conscious hip hop crew and produce more complex and better music than most mainstream labels - check my sig. My emcees are more skilled than most of the latest studio-emcess, and they have great stage presence, and we have actual artistic/intelligent lyrics that have value beyond simple entertainment. I've been making music since before it was easy. MS-DOS was the OS when I started.
Re:Good line (Score:0, Insightful)
Why steal when you can copy?
Old Codger Reveals All (Score:5, Insightful)
You reap what you sow...and what the record companies sowed were generations of unsophisticated listeners that don't know the difference between the popular artists and their next door neighbor and his robot. Musicianship, composition, pshaw. Drum machines and stored samples.
I don't care at all, there's plenty of vibrant and new alternative music -- that being jazz and classical and what's out in the World. Just look.
Re:How is this news? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Good line (Score:5, Insightful)
Good riddance to the pros (Score:5, Insightful)
Free Market at Work (Score:5, Insightful)
Being unable to make a living at something is the free market's way of telling you to find something else to do. Horse dung sweepers used to be a necessary job in cities before automobiles, now not so much. They either became machine street sweeper operators, or found a new job. If the same happens to mediocre musicians, so be it. The very good ones will still find work.
I notice that new artists like Lady Gaga have adopted the popular "freemium" business model. She has given away literally billions of views of her music videos, and collects the ad revenue that YouTube pays, but it's free to the audience. Then she sells a limited commodity - seats at live shows - at a premium. I do that too, give away basic content, charge for premium service.
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Likewise, the $100/hour studio's extra quality doesn't help when some moron will crank all the knobs to 11 and compress it to hell to produce the master. Then it will be played through cheap earbuds. Now that DIY recording is becoming practical, the old way isn't looking so good. It can produce better results but typically doesn't even though it always costs more.
This is the story for all kinds of art (Score:5, Insightful)
Art makes a great hobby - zillions of people play music, write short stories, act in amateur theater groups, whatever. This is wonderful for culture. Frankly I often prefer a heartfelt amateur performance to an overly-polished professional group going through the motions of the same damn thing for the thousandth time.
My heart does not bleed for professional artists. Most of them need to get a real job to support their hobby, the same as the rest of us...
Re:How is this news? (Score:4, Insightful)
Forcing viewers to interrupt the experience of a movie because they have to get up and change a tape is not "quality".
Re:Also... (Score:3, Insightful)
... one might note that the mainstream industry has very little appeal to people that are intellectual or at least deeply interested in the actual content of their music.
As has been true for the entire history of the music industry absent a few short-lived innovative movements that were quickly and summarily dismembered, regurgitated, and run into the ground by the big labels.
And what you're saying is really the opposite of what TFA contends, which is that the industry isn't dying because people can churn out better music than the big labels produce, but rather that Joe Blow in his bedroom can now churn out the same mediocre crap that the labels have always spoon fed to us. And believe me, the VAST majority of "bedroom producers" are producing music just as terrible as what you hear on top 40 radio.
Since the advent of pop music, intelligent, challenging music has always been a niche product compared to the crap that most people listen too. And that crap just keeps getting worse, since the record labels know that people want to hear loud, repetitive music that they can dance to. Melody, songwriting, feeling, and dynamics have all turned out to be dispensable. Of course, now that the downward trending quality curve and upward trending ease of entry curve have intersected, there is very little point to listening to big label music.
Of course the one thing the labels still do have going for them (and the reason I fundamentally disagree with this article) is that most people can't be bothered to even seek out crap, which is why they will continue to pay the big labels to spoon feed them.
Musicians are nobodies. Deal with it. (Score:5, Insightful)
For most of history, musicians were nobodies, ranking below, say, bartenders. For a brief period in history, from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, being a musician was a Big Deal. That's over. At peak, there were over 8 million bands on Myspace. Some of which didn't suck.
On top of that, music became automated. Between synthesizers and AutoTune, who needs musicianship? All those years of practice, and your job can be done by a box that costs a few hundred dollars.
Utter Nonsense! (Score:3, Insightful)
The reason the music industry is in any kind of trouble is because of how the companies that control this industry are not, in effect, effectively growing the industry, mostly because of incompetence, not being artists themselves.
There are not enough artists in society.
Artists are the ones who dream the dreams that become tomorrows reality. Art is what lifts up your day and get you out of your troubles, etc.
When art degrades so does society.
The companies that run this industry are like vampires making money on artist's creations. (Part of it are our own fault since there is this popular consideration that if you are an artist you should suffer as that gives you more to "draw" from. Also nonsense, but so true to most of us that most makes sure they suffer. As a result they think that cannot properly and effectively handle themselves and that they let these companies control their output.)
The same companies are not only incompetent in many things, but helping artists grow strong is not on their agenda. Strong artists are a threat to them, rightly so given their criminal level of exchange.
If you wonder why any art form is suffering don't even think it's because of too much competition as that will never lead to a solution. Now if you don't want a solution then you should promote this idea that there is too much competition.
BTW, "just good enough", comes from the same companies. They are the ones releasing it.
As a note, which is known to established musicians, the only way to make money is to tour since the labels keep 90% of the profits.
Re:No wonder we have no [music] legends anymore... (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course we have - go listen to a classical concert and you see a lot of good, well trained musicians.
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
This already happens. Deadmau5 has confessed he basically shows up, presses "play" and dances a lot. (no cite readily to hand, sorry)
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, sorry I don't think it is about quality.
Let me illustrate. So I have a burger, and I serve it to people. One costs 1 dollar and another costs 10 dollars. Does the 10 dollar burger have better quality?
It reminds me of the movie "The Devil Wears Prada". Remember the scene with the "blue" belt? What people are doing is splitting hairs. Google essentially killed my profession (being quite serious here), but I am not complaining because I use Google as well. What the Internet has done is forced musicians to say, "oh wait I am not worth 10 gazillion dollars?"
This is what the Internet is doing namely reassessing what you are actually worth. I don't think this is bad because this is what happens all the time. It is called free market economics, capitalism, the invisible hand, what have you. So if somebody complains I say, "suck it up daisy!" Move on and figure it out. Ask yourself the following. When cars began to overtake horses do you want to be a buggy whip manufacturer or car mechanic?
Re:Also...deflationary internet (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, in the early days, my band paid off two home mortgages by giving away terrible quality mp3's and asking for 10 bucks for a high quality CD - and we got lots of sales. Yes, we were good live and in our (homebuilt) analog, then digital studio. We had a decent following, and got an offer from Warners. Being engineers, a couple of us read the contract - no frigging way we'd sign that stupid thing. We had product *already* but they wanted to "front" us millions to remake it in their overpriced studios, cut a deal where we got a tiny fraction of any profit after all costs (mostly imaginary) by them were paid and so forth. While she's otherwise "out there" Courtney Love's rant on this is dead on - hollywood accounting isn't worth being on the wrong side of. My own book sold over 50k copies and they haven't paid me a dime yet - I know because it came with code, and my email was in the code. The book co claimed I sold negative numbers some months!
The internet is the most deflationary creation of all time. Back in the day, if you wanted music, you made your own, or watched one of the rare "artistes" touring your little settler town. Or you lived in one of the bigger cities in a pile of manure on the streets.
The record company model only lasted as long as artificial scarcity could be created. With the fact that it's now easier to be good at music (better gear, some stuff helps you "cheat"), and that now there's little if any scarcity - they lose, just like buggy whip/carriage makers. Good riddance, they were cheating all the actual workers all along, as Frank Zappa correctly stated.
Go see your local bands, and buy their CD's out of the back of the car if you like them. Better model, we'll get better music as a result anyway.
Did you know that if I want to hear say, the Berlin Philharmonic play say from 1950 or so - it's illegal? Not in print - but still in copyright. Making a copy, if I find one, is against the law, but I can't find anyone to pay to make it legal either. So those assholes have stolen our musical heritage for all time. Don't support them.
Isn't this exactly the history of musicians? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Also... (Score:4, Insightful)
One might also note that the mainstream industry makes orders of magnitude more money (a measure of success) than the "bedroom produced" music and talent scene that you belong to.
By that logic, Budweiser makes the best beer and Microsoft makes the best OS?
Re:Good riddance to the pros (Score:2, Insightful)
It is well-documented how the jazz club scene has been decimated in the last few years, and the same may apply for a significant slice of the popular music world.
I was watching an episode of Bar Rescue (about a jazz club) and it was mentioned that something like only 3% of the population lists jazz as their favorite kind of music. Not sure what the percentage of people who just like jazz is, but the 3% figure may be reasonable for determining how many people are willing to go to listen to it live--there are many artists I like but only a few whose concerts I attend. In any case, the death of the jazz club likely has more to do with the declining popularity of the genre than people choosing to stay home.
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
No. I completely disagree. It's the same as it ever was and ever will be.
If you plot almost any human metric on a graph you will get a bell curve type distribution where there is always a small percentage that is the superlative of that particular metric.
The rest is mediocre because, well, that's the definition of mediocre.
Let me see if I got this... (Score:4, Insightful)
When given a choice, people choose what they like. 'Quality' in what people find entertaining or pleasurable is entirely subjective. The music 'industry' has been based on restricting choice and pushing products on largely captive markets. The world has changed.
Re:Good line (Score:5, Insightful)
On top of that, the music of the 70's has been filtered through 40 years and many songs were thankfully lost along the way. In forty years we'll know for sure what was notable today - right now i may have missed it in a cacophony of many sounds that do not interest me.
Re:Also... (Score:2, Insightful)
goodness...you do know you come across as a completely self-absorbed elitist, don't you?
if you have to tell people how "successful" and "complex" your music is and how you are as an artist, you have already lost those battles.
Re:How is this news? (Score:4, Insightful)
These days the ringtone can sell more copies than the original song, which isn't surprising because most songs are pretty much just one two second hook repeated ad-infinitum.
The money is in licensing, getting songs used in films and adverts.
Re:You don't even need a laptop.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Audacity - simple, clunky, terrible interface Audacity - is basically the multitrack recorder we would have FUCKING KILLED FOR in the 1980s. And 1990s.
Pros who aren't super-famous restored... (Score:5, Insightful)
Pros who aren't super-famous *restored* the "music industry" for me, assuming that what you mean is "got me to pay for music". On more occasions than I can count, I have visited coffee shops or the San Gregorio General Store [sangregoriostore.com] and flipped some money into the tip jar.
Prior to that, I just didn't pay for stuff because radio was good enough, or I had Yahoo music subscription and they ruined it. So yeah, RIAA got ruined by pros who aren't famous, but these guys get money directly from me without going through you and I help to support interesting local music. In other words, so long RIAA. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
As a former owner of a small studio back in the 90s I regret the loss of quality as reflected in poor playback conditions (ear buds, bad headphones etc.) and the ubiquity of MP3s (no they do not sound the same, and it's the difference between pretty good and superb). I recorded to 16 channels of analog tape with Dolby S, and it was fantastic quality sound.
The other side of this, though, is the easy availability of very good digital processing equipment. Now that the standard is 24 bit, there are no longer headroom problems and the noise floors are low. A studio like the one I had would be today largely superfluous, or at the least not very busy. (Good mics still cost, and, leaving aside possible questions of technique, that's where many home recordists seem to fall back in quality.) Music is easy to distribute.
So it's hardly all a black picture. The marketplace delivers what the market demands. Live with it.
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Audio technician here.
A well-tuned sound system adds a lot to a party environment. No, it's not going to be cranked up to full volume, nor playing death metal, but it will be on and loud enough to understand. The room should be fairly well-padded, so the music is heard but doesn't produce echoes. With such a setup, the music is a diversion, filling the empty space that otherwise is an "awkward silence". If and only if there's a gap in the conversation or someone wants to hear it, the music comes through.
Not all music must be loud, and not all parties must be quiet.
Re: How is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
For what it's worth, professional musicians often do use autotune. The difference is that they don't rely on it. It's a safety net, in case that sore throat from the past 5 weeks of touring throws off the key line in the chorus. Most of the time, the autotune just sits there doing nothing, because the singers hit the notes perfectly.
I don't have a problem with this (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How is this news? (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember the scene with the "blue" belt?
No, but then again I don't have a vagina either.
Coincidentally you'll never get any action from a vagina either. Some of us have a girlfriend or are married and watch movies with our significant others, some of which they choose. Feel free to pop your head up out of the basement and ask your mom if you need to verify this practice.
Re: How is this news? (Score:3, Insightful)
The music industry conveniently ignores the fact that technology made them rich in the first place.
Until recording devices came along the only way to make money was from playing live.
After records were invented the music industry suddenly became much more profitable be ause you could sell your product to masses instead of limited live audiences.
Now new technology, the Internet and digital copying, have taken away what the old technology gave.
The gravy train was good while it lasted but its time that musicians got back to working for a living, like the rest do us, and the record companies crawled back under the rock the crawled out from.
technology vs. quality (Score:5, Insightful)
this summary and the whole thread make absolutely no sense to me.
Definitely true that the technological hurdles for recording music have been coming down. For $100, I can buy a high-quality interface for plugging my guitar into my ipad. For $200, a condensed microphone. And garageband costs $15, and it's free on new phones and ipads. I can see how all of this really hurts the music industry, from the technical side - all the recording techs, fancy recording studios, especially those that catered to the mid-tier pay-for-it-yourself crowd. I'm sure they're getting pinched.
Also, more competition broadens the market. There will be fewer multi-millionaire recording artists, but I bet the total amount spent on music (including live shows, etc) will only grow because the supply is growing. This trickles up to the record labels as well - sorry capital records!
But he're is what I don't get - the idea that the quality of music will go down. You know, the amount of music that's really good. I think this can only go up! The music industry has always had this shadow of really talented people who didn't make the cut for the big boys. Now they all have a voice, and there will be many more diamonds that rise to the top.
In short, the music recording industry may be taking a hit, but the music culture is going through a renaissance.
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
FTFY
Re: How is this news? (Score:4, Insightful)
The music industry conveniently ignores the fact that technology made them rich in the first place.
Until recording devices came along the only way to make money was from playing live.
After records were invented the music industry suddenly became much more profitable be ause you could sell your product to masses instead of limited live audiences.
Now new technology, the Internet and digital copying, have taken away what the old technology gave.
The gravy train was good while it lasted but its time that musicians got back to working for a living, like the rest do us, and the record companies crawled back under the rock the crawled out from.
Not entirely. With the new tech if you can get 10 million people to pay you 99c a download, you'll gather a ton of money. If you can get 990 million people to pay you 1c per download, you'll make the same amount, but be more famous. The only barrier in the way of the 2nd strategy is middlemen who want a cut.
What's remarkably different for modern people is the nearly instant availability of the works of the best and most famous artists (who are mostly not the same people). In the old days, even if you were the Emperor of Austria-Hungary, you couldn't listen to any artist anytime you wanted. Not even within a week of the desire hitting you, in most cases. At best, you had to choose from among a small number, and unless you were really important, few if any had any real talent. Now we have the opposite problem: thousands of choices, some very good, almost all instantly available, but buried in a sea of shlock that makes finding artists worth listening to difficult, if not as difficult as it was for the Emperor of Austria-Hungary.
Re: How is this news? (Score:2, Insightful)
No they don't have a right to feel snobby about somebody else's accomplishments. If they actually DO something, they can be snobby about that and be significantly less douchebaggy.
Re:technology vs. quality (Score:5, Insightful)
But I would still warrant that if you professionally engineered your stuff and put it up against your home recording, people would pick the professional job; if the price were the same.
you still don't get it...
Yes, if you took the same song and compared the studio recording with a bootleg, people will choose the studio recording.
BUT!!! If you took a studio recording of a sucky song, and compared it to a bootleg of an awesome song, people will choose the awesome song. Don't you get this? people want to listen to awesome things! they don't want to pay for sucky things!
Also, I hear what you're saying about sound engineers vs. amateurs. But I bet that a reasonably trained and provisioned amateur (a couple hundred $$ in gear, a couple editing classes or online courses) could get a pretty good result. so it's not about comparing the best technical quality to shit quality, you're comparing the best technical quality to pretty good quality.
lastly, there's no point in buying the finest most exquisitely recorded record in history if you're just going to play them through a set of earbuds. I would say a very minute portion of the population listens to music with the proper equipment and in the proper setting to discern pro from pretty good. heck, i spend most of my time listening to internet radio, so everything's already been compressed to hell and back!
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Most working musicians make their money playing gigs and selling merchandise. Only the lucky get big money recording deals. And even the ones who get the recording contracts will usually get less than ten cents from every dollar sold. Record companies usually just take 50% or more off the top. Just because. Then they start taking their other cuts from their (profit, recording fees, marketing fees, etc etc etc. and a few pennies for the band.... now go promote it). Regular bands and musicians take their gigs as they can get them and some good enough or lucky enough get regular work. And even then the better ones count on the occasional private gig that they can charge or get paid a bit or more better than club pay.
So the whole gazillion dollar thing... I call bullshit. What kills a lot of musicians is new shite bands who charge way less than they should because they live at home or have a day job, and think just getting in will let them live as a musician. It is like the whole living wage debate, there needs to be a minimum fee. And bar owners who are trying to make a go of it themselves who are then lead to believe that they are paying fair rates because some bands take it.
Most people think a musician is working when they are on stage so wow the band gets paid a grand (thousand bucks) for four hours work (and now-a-days many bars don't like paying half that). Meanwhile they neglect to notice that pay has to be split four or five ways to the band members. And that also has to cover daily practice (yes that is work, it is their job), rental of practice space (because who can afford a house with a garage to practice in on those wages?), and pay for gas, never mind the car to get to and from the gig. That 200 to 250 dollars starts getting spread pretty thinly. Hopefully you can get two or three gigs this week...
So this whole thing about musicians getting their money from recordings is for the lucky few. At best it is the demo home recording (or studio if you have the dough) self produced CD sold at regular gigs while you do road circuits across the country or state or province or city, if you live in a city that supports live bands.
The whole gazillion dollar recording artist is what we see on TV or hear on radio. But they are the lucky few. There are a lot of really talented people out there who are in the trenches, playing from club to club.