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."
Music Industry (Score:5, Interesting)
They have given us terrible artists for years, maybe they will finally go away...
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Interesting)
Professional recording artists sell fuck-all these days. In the UK: in 1983, Red Guitars got to #8 in the indie charts with 60,000 sales of "Good Technology". In 2013, Rihanna has a mainstream number one album with under 10,000 sales [digitalspy.co.uk].
The important thing to remember is that "pop music" is not actually all that popular. It's mostly a way to get publicity for your live shows and yourself as a celebrity - buy yourself onto the iTunes top 40. You've never heard of half these people because they are not actually popular.
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
The fact that you can produce mediocre quality in his bedroom using digital equipment does not mean the death of quality.
The cost of a quality piece of music, simply means that someone with a better understanding of the process, and slightly better tools, and a desire to produce a quality product, will take the time to do so. But that doesn't mean a full recording studio, 47 musicians, 5 bodies in the control room.
It means one or two dedicated people using slightly (and I do means SLIGHTLY) better computers with more skill will still find enough of a market for their recordings or appearances to pay their bills, and stay in business, long after the crap churning artists move on to day jobs. A few will find success in music, but most will take up farming (or whatever).
This is an age old story:
Just look at the crapbands you knew in high school, annoying the neighbors practicing in their garage every Saturday. If you are like most people you don't know a single one of these clowns that even bothers to pick up an instrument today. They were never good enough to bother listening to. Even the vocalists sucked.
Perhaps Artists will appear on stage with boat load of synthesizers and stacks of keyboards, and (hopefully) not a real instrument anywhere in sight. You won't be able to tell if you are hearing a recording or they are playing any of it live, and you probably won't care. Tangerine Dream made a lot of money in appearances with seldom a real instrument appearing on the stage.
Re:RIP RIAA (Score:2, Interesting)
professional musicians are usually no better...
No, professional musicians are almost always better. Unfortunately, they're rarely attractive enough to get record contracts. If you want to find professional musicians, look in symphonies, operas and musicals. Those guys can play/sing anything. Hell...look in the background of all those "talent" reality shows...they guys in the back playing the instruments for the talentless amateur that the judges fawn over are professional.
The music industry started its decline when they chose to promote attractive "artists" over talented artists. The advancement of technology in enabling amateurs is only the latest inevitable step in that decline.
The Beauty of the Original Idea (Score:5, Interesting)
A beautiful and raw original idea kicks the ass of a flawlessly executed banality.
Who cares if the music industry deflates? The "Rock Stars" are a study in decadence and greed and the "Music Industry" is a study in ruthlessness and greed.
Cubase, ProTools, Ableton . . .. The kids of today are going to lead us away from "computer music" into very new territory. Just imagine what Mozart could create if he had a decent music workstation!
The music industry (as it has been) would have us listening to stuff that was fresh forty years ago.
Sooner or later the kids are going to learn how to market themselves, just like they're mastering the new music creation tools.
I'll give up production values for originality any day.
Re:This is the story for all kinds of art (Score:5, Interesting)
Totally agree.
And add to that a previous article by a professional producer talking about how new bands get financially screwed by the industry and routinely make less than at a 711 on their first few tours...
What exactly are we supposed to be protecting here??
Exploitation? Slavery? Cult of personality? The needs of the few super stars to be filthy rich at the expense of the rest?
Please...
This is AWESOME and I have personally been wishing for it to happen for over a decade now.
Let the revolution begin. Only good will come of this.
Next step: KILL ITUNES!!
Re:Old Codger Reveals All (Score:4, Interesting)
Pretty much this. What's the difference between bad music music and bad food?, you can die from bad food. You don't hear the restaurant industry complain that people can cook at home, do we?
Re:huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
It is not just professional singers who do not need electronic 'tricks' to produce good music. Many churches, schools, colleges etc have excellent choirs, and have done since before the recorded music industry was even thought of. Similarly there are many excellent amateur orchestras, and Northern British collieries had world famous brass bands - whose members were miners.
Musician's prospective (Score:3, Interesting)
I haven't posted here in years, partly because I've been too focused on my music career.
First off (-topic), fuck Cubase, Ableton is waaaay better and just as easily pirated. And while on the subject of piracy, musicians spend more money on music (shows, instruments, hardware, etc) than anyone else, all while actively giving back to the music community by producing art; if they pirate music software, I say good as long as they can't afford it, because it at least allows them to create their art, which is good for everybody. I haven't paid for my copy of Ableton yet, but I definitely plan on it once I can.
Now regarding primary points of the article. Say what you want, but making beautiful expressive music is extremely difficult in a digital environment. Sure you can correct your mistakes, layer a dozen parts by yourself, and accomplish musical feats with the press of a button that, e.g., concert pianists might spend their whole life practicing to achieve, but none of that has to do with the artistic side of music. What the author really means is that humans no longer have to spend years practicing fine muscle coordination to be able to create complex music, but that doesn't free the musician of the burden of turning sound into art with real expression behind it.
This is why a lot of electronic music sounds stale and repetitive. If you don't know, there exist "construction kits" which allow me to create, e.g., an above average trap song in about an hour (including mastering). A lot of people do this, but a lot fewer go--or even know to go---to the trouble of creating real expressive content so that the music is not only aurally pleasing and cerebrally interesting, but also emotionally evocative. Evocativeness used to be a given in music, but these days it has to be sought out. That said, all the best producers reliably achieve it, even in the digital space, which can add challenges since expression is fundamentally an analog creature.
What's true is there's a lot more noise around the signal. This can make it a lot harder for good musicians to succeed, but most of the doom-and-gloom perspective comes from the masses of shitty musicians who've entered the market now that the barriers to entry are lowered: Talent still rises to the top, but all these n00bs who create digitally perfect tracks that sound like music are whining en mass that no one listens to their songs and that it must the system's fault because their tracks sound good. People don't listen to music because it "sounds good", they listen to it because it's art, i.e. it has content and is moving. Everything else is just icing on the cake, but who wants to eat just icing all the time.
I don't need to be a rock star to be a satisfied musician. That said, if you don't believe there exist rock stars and legends these days, clearly you've never been to a Bassnectar concert or are otherwise not paying attention.
In case you're interested:
https://soundcloud.com/mdmtmusic [soundcloud.com]
https://soundcloud.com/mdmt-development [soundcloud.com]
https://www.facebook.com/MDMTmusic [facebook.com]
And if you're in the Denver area, we're playing at Cervantes on Sept 29th.
Re:How is this news? (Score:4, Interesting)
Nope. I can't eat the $1 crap from McDonald's. It makes me nauseous. I prefer spending about five bucks at Five Guys or In-N-Out. The $15 premium burger is damn good, but that means a trip into The City (San Francisco), and if I'm going through that much trouble for dinner I would rather eat at my favorite French bistro.
Re:How is this news? (Score:2, Interesting)
I went to a Five Guys once. Someone said it was good. On the window they had a large sign, "best $5 burger in town". Bold words I thought.
Went inside and looked at the menu and the least expensive burger on the menu was $5.85. That's not a "$5 burger". I walked out without ordering and have no intention of going back. If a business is going to be that flagrant about their dishonesty, it's difficult to ignore what other things they are going to be dishonest about.
Re:technology vs. quality (Score:5, Interesting)
In short, the music recording industry may be taking a hit, but the music culture is going through a renaissance.
Yep, why does Ireland have so many popular musicians and singers for such a small country? Go to a good Irish pub and you will find out. All UK pubs were like that at one time, no need to hire entertainment since the pub is full of talented locals who are more interested in entertaining each other than getting paid..
Re: How is this news? (Score:4, Interesting)
Most musicians don't get any money from recordings - in fact, in my experience we lost money making recordings. We got an advance that went entirely to studio time (no, the studios don't pay for it, the musicians do). The musician's cut (often 10-15% of post-tax earnings on an album for noobs) is used to pay off that advance. If I remember correctly, my band would have had to sell over 30000 albums just to pay back our studio time. We sold about half that, which is quite good for new bands I'm told. Unfortunately, our relations with the studio and stability as a band went south from there. Where I made money as a musician was on songwriting (15% of post-tax earnings) and as a studio musician (work for hire).
Speaking of works for hire, I for one would like to see a little pain for some of the major studios. EMI in particular, which declared all of their artists works as "works for hire" so the works never go back to the artist and are corporate owned forever.