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)
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Informative)
Beta took two tapes to hold a movie, while VHS took one, this was significant. The quality difference when hooked up to old TV sets via RF was negligible. If I recall, Beta machines were more expensive as well. At the time, VHS was a better choice for most people.
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.
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: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:4, Funny)
You knew perfectly well what I meant.
Yep, I know exactly what you meant. It's not a real instrument because it's not being played by a true scotsman.
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.
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Beta took two tapes to hold a movie, while VHS took one, this was significant.
What? I had a Betamax machine, and rented full-length movies for it all the time. And the movies were each on one cassette, except for extremely long ones (over 3 hours) that came on two tapes for both formats, to avoid compromises in quality from slower playback speed.
Both Beta and VHS cassettes were available in many lengths. The medium to longer ones in both formats were able to hold a 2- or 3-hour movie, even at the fastest playback speeds.
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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:How is this news? (Score:4, Informative)
Originally (and until fairly recently) most films came in cans that were only 12 minutes long. There have been a few tricks done by projectionists over the years including winding that film into a giant spool and splicing those various pieces of film together prior to what you saw in a movie theater, or by having multiple projectors set up where the moment one of those cans of film would end the next projector would immediately start running.
Still, if you had to interrupt your movie to switch tapes, it sounds like you had a genuine cinematic experience. Perhaps a little too authentic, and I guess you could enhance that by having two month old spilled soda on your floor along with bubble gum under the chairs and lots of popcorn and empty boxes of other candy strewn about.
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One day I'm going to rip and splice all of my LOTR extended edition BluRays. I've been saying this since before they came out, of course.
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?
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I don't know - and you don't provide sufficient information for use to decide as you simply present us with two boxes in identical plain wrappers.... but with different price tags. You didn't 'illustrate' anything.
But in the real world, yes, a $10 hamburger can be of much higher quality than a $1 one. (But not always, because there's a lot that goe
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 musicia
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: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.
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.
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:5, Funny)
He's not supposed to have sex with his mother.
Re: How is this news? (Score:5, Funny)
He was a "genius" in an Apple Store.
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.
Re: How is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: How is this news? (Score:4)
You have to admit, there is some mechanism in our brains which releases all sorts of lovely neurotransmitters when we take credit for discovering something before another person.
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Most people simply had other overriding priorities. When my parents bought their first VCR they cared about quality, just not as much as being able to buy cheap tapes to keep a 2 year old entertained. That's hardly "quality be damned".
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If "professional" musicians can't get people to purchase their music and people instead purchase some "inferior" music isn't that "inferior" music actually superior because it's what people want?
Frankly, "inferior" and "superior" are incredibly subjective and it's really a waste of time unless you want to get into a fanboi holy war.
Windows 7 is the most popular operating system. Does that make it "superior" to OS X or Linux?
iOS is the second most popular phone operator system. Does that make "inferior" to Android but "superior" than Windows Phone or Blackberry OS 10?
Budweiser is the top selling beer in the world. Does that make it "superior" to Corona or the various microbrews?
Popular : Superior
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"Professional" music isn't actually superior these days in most cases: the record labels force the recording/mixing engineers to overly compress the mix, leading to a lot of distortion and a complete lack of dynamic range. Read up on the "loudness wars" for more info. CDs/MP3s these days sound much worse than ones made in the 80s.
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
FTFY
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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: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..
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Yes, the music biz is not the music scene.
I have an objection, the trend towards more affordable gear started with midi and pcs, so it boomed in the 90s, while the possibility for distribution through internet boomed before 2000. Plenty of time to witness the renaissance you speak of. It is not happening, quality goes down.
There must be something more to it, the motivation for making music is a factor affecting the quality of the result, for example.
What if the new musicians want simply to imitate the forme
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!
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If "good enough" were the rule for music, local indie bands would have far bigger followings than they do.
The majority of people don't just want "good enough" music -- they want a "name brand." So they can "look cool" by listening to them.
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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: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:How is this news? (Score:5, Informative)
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Indeed. In the days of physical media being the only way to get recorded music it was common for a band to release an album with two good tracks and the rest just filler, and anyone wanting the two good tracks was forced to pay the full album price. Toto IV stands out in my memory - two tremendous tracks (Rosanna and Africa) which are the first and last ones on the album, with dreck in between. I never heard anyone play the whole album (more than once).
Same strategy as cable "bundling" of stuff you want wit
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: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:5, Funny)
Shit. What the hell is happening to people these days? Does McDonalds really need to sell their burgers with instructions? You are supposed to open the friggin box, remove the contents, and just eat the contents for christ sake!
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Funny)
You are supposed to open the friggin box, remove the contents, and just eat the contents for christ sake!
But then you lose half the nutritional value!
Quality burger and qualtiy music (Score:3)
That is the issue the music industry is facing: while a lot of people can tell the $1 burger from everything else they cannot tell the difference between the $5 burger and the $15 burger. Be
Music Industry (Score:5, Interesting)
They have given us terrible artists for years, maybe they will finally go away...
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Good line (Score:2)
whenever quality competes with convenience, convenience wins every time
And I shall steal it shamelessly .
Re:Good line (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Funny thing, most fellow mid & late 90s grads I know are fine with most 80s music -- everything pales in comparison to the embarrassment of having owned MC Hammer, Vanilla Ice, or Sir Mix-a-lot albums/tapes.
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.
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Back before I bought satellite radio for both my vehicles I used to listen to regular radio and it was awful. Every new band they played followed the exact same format. They had one or two singles and then a ballad or much lighter song would get played. Then another single that was not as successful as the first and then they'd disappear.
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Radio ... that's the thing you listen to in your car, right? When the MP3s on your phone are too varied.
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... 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
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Right, also don't forget that music wasn't paying musicians very well even before the latest wave of bedroom mixing was going on. I've been reading about this for at least a decade and it's been a problem for decades before that.
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As someone who is currently obsessed with a certain recently popular show, I totally agree on the fan fiction point. There's a huge pile of crap, but some of the stuff being produced by fans is mindblowingly good, with writing and editing on-par with professionally produced mid tier books.
Personally I love that technology is lowering the barrier to entry for this stuff. It's really happening with books, as self publishing is becoming a viable option. Music is pretty close, with ardour and lmms and cheap har
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In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen people. [imomus.com]
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.
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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:Also... (Score:5, Funny)
Wrong. Budweiser bottles the best horse piss and Microsoft makes the best migraines.
Deja Moo (Score:5, Funny)
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."
Sacred cows make the best hamburgers.
Re:Deja Moo (Score:5, Funny)
That's a ridiculous statement. The ones I've seen can't even hold a spatula.
Re:Deja Moo (Score:4, Funny)
YMMV. A truly amazing cow would shoot herself in the head so that you can eat her.
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.
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With classical, it's worse because current performers are directly competing with the big names from the past. Glenn Gould's original recording of the Goldberg variations even went out of copyright in some European countries (and has been re-copyrighted in others).
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?
No wonder we have no [music] legends anymore... (Score:2)
Put another way, we have musicians who don't have a clue on how to play a musical instrument at all! Trouble is, they are still famous - for their voice I guess.
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.
Good riddance to the pros (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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: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: (Score:3)
Have you actually used that piece of crap? Have you read about the dodgy market capturing moves they routinely pull?
Have you heard about the lock in?
The list goes on.
Down with ITUNES!!! :)
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.
Musicians used to be right above Jesters (Score:3)
Bravely bold Sir Robin
Rode forth from Camelot.
He was not afraid to die,
Oh brave Sir Robin.
He was not at all afraid
To be killed in nasty ways.
Brave, brave, brave, brave Sir Robin.
He was not in the least bit scared
To be mashed into a pulp.
Or to have his eyes gouged out,
And his elbows broken.
To have his kneecaps split
And his body burned away,
And his limbs all hacked and mangled
Brave Sir Robin.
His head smashed in
And his heart cut out
And his liver removed
And his bowls unplugged
And his nostrils raped
And his bottom burnt off
And his pen--
"That's... that's enough music for now lads,
*** there's dirty work afoot*** ???."
Brave Sir Robin ran away.
("No!")
Bravely ran away away.
("I didn't!")
When danger reared it's ugly head,
He bravely turned his tail and fled.
("no!")
Yes, brave Sir Robin turned about
("I didn't!")
And gallantly he chickened out.
****Bravely**** taking ("I never did!") to his feet,
He beat a very brave retreat.
("all lies!")
Bravest of the braaaave, Sir Robin!
("I never!")
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.
Truth (Score:3)
And whenever quality competes with convenience, convenience wins every time.
That's true in photography as well and, perhaps to a lesser extent, video. There is a certain quality that is "good enough" for human perception.
I can listen to MP3s from nearly ten years ago and they sound just fine to me. I can still use the same loops I was using in 2004 and they still work in songs today in the same mixing software.
The very reason amateurs can catch up to a big studio technologically is that there isn't as much obsolescence in audio. And why variations of the iPhone occupy the top three slots of the most popular cameras on Flickr.
It will be interesting to see if the video industry can push 4K. 2K and HD look just great projected on the big screen and 4K seems like the first upgrade for the sake of upgrading.
You don't even need a laptop.... (Score:3)
Garage Band on an iPad (or even an iPhone) is as good as $100/hr trip at the local recording studio. Heck, it's better than what you could get even 20 years ago, back when the only real home recording option was multitrack cassette tape. Technology improved enough in the 90's to allow home computers to do good multitrack recordings, and suddenly everything changed. Nowadays, you can whip up a quick demo on your iPhone without the need of any musical instruments, and it would be just as good as that $500 demo tape you had produced in the 1980's. A 10 year old can do it in no time at all and without any help. It's really amazing!
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.
Isn't this exactly the history of musicians? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
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.
I don't have a problem with this (Score:5, Insightful)
A long time ago (Score:3)
most musicians traveled and got paid by passing the hat. Then came the record companies that turned musicianship (or at least marketing of music) into a multibillion dollar business, including big bucks for a few megapopular artists that they hyped and pushed on radio stations.
My question is this- why should musicians (or athletes, etc.) make millions of dollars for making music? Why don't the engineers who designed the iPhone (no, it wasn't Jobs who designed it) make millions? All the fuss over pirating music is because the record companies can't figure out how to keep their cash-cow mooing. They've been screwing most musicians for years. Now they are getting screwed and they don't like it. I find it hard to feel any sympathy for them. And to musicians who have trouble earning a living I say this: don't quit your day job.
Re: (Score:3)
You might think that, but I mentioned the problem in the article for live musicians: in the '80s they were competing with boring television, now they're competing with an Internet full of ATTENTION GRABBING EVERYTHING. I wrote that bit from talking to musicians who can't even get decent pay for gigs any more and are wondering what the fuck happened.
Re: (Score:3)
What you're missing is that the mainstream has never been about seeking out aesthetic quality. The driving force has always been to market things they know how to market. Weird shit can spend its time in the indie leagues, and we can pick it up later.
Re:Terrible for musicians? (Score:4, Informative)
There has never been a better time to make one's vocation music for the very reasons you have suggested
To wit, click through to the end of this video (the video is pretty good too - it's one thing to cover a song, but it's completely another to make it yours). Nataly Dawn initially asked for $20K of donations for studio time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6Z7xceSLy4 [youtube.com]
Pomplamoose (Jack Conte and Nataly Dawn) being interviewed on the BIRN about how to make a living and other things.
Part one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fa3-SA9SvZ0 [youtube.com]
Part two: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6a2jQ5zY94 [youtube.com]
Part three: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKLf3Bjn3v0 [youtube.com]
--
BMO
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.
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.
Re: (Score:3)
Which is the entire point of autotune. Fix the rare slip. Unfortunately, far too many talentless hacks pushed by record executives because they have "the right look" can only perform with autotune turned up to eleven.
Lockout chip (Score:3)
- Hey, anyone can make computer programs at home. All programers will starve
That's exactly why consoles have lockout chips. In 1983 when anyone and everyone was making Atari 2600 games, they were flooding store shelves, and no one was buying for fear of getting burned by dropping what amounts to $60 (after inflation) on boring, unbalanced gameplay. Nintendo had to erect an entry barrier in order to reassure North American toy stores that its NES would avoid the same fate.
Re: (Score:3)
Antares didn't release Autotune until 1997, well after Thriller.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autotune [wikipedia.org]