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Cheap Audio Production
OneInEveryCrowd writes "Rolling Stone reports that four out of five new albums are now produced by a program called Pro Tools (or similar packages) that costs $495 for the home version or $15,000 for the pro version. The article describes a fairly amazing savings in time and effort compared to the older ways of producing an album. I realize that a talented producer can cost a lot of money and some bands drink a lot of beer, but why aren't the benefits of lower production costs being passed on to the consumer?"
To hell with the consumer, how about the artist?
why aren't the benefits of lower production costs being passed on to the consumer?
I suspect its because 99% of the cost of producing commercially successful records is not (and never has been) studio related. Sure, studio time costs a fair bit, but never anything like the amount of money that is typically spent on publicity, production, promotion, distribution, and stuff like that.
Production savings will only get passed to the consumer when other producers are willing to compete on price - but if Band X produces their next album for $200,000 less than the previous one, why should they cut the price at all?
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
because there is no competition!
It it were a truly open market, then these increases in efficiency would be passed on to the consumer as lower prices. However, since the recording industry has done everything possible to insure that there is little or no competition, it just results in higher profits.
This is the danger inherent in monopolies and oligopolies.
The punk mentality has paid-off in some situations. Look at Epitaph or Fat Wreck Chords. Not only are they highly sucessful, but are good to the bands. And, the bands are good to the fans.
Click here or here.
but why aren't the benefits of lower production costs being passed on to the consumer?
Why do movies still cost an arm and a leg to go see when they use Linux clusters rather than SGI machines to do the rendering? Just because a company becomes more efficient doesn't mean they have to pass on the savings. What if the company was losing money until they found a way to shave a few bucks from their costs and make a profit? Are they supposed to cut their prices and continue to lose money?
Trolling is a art,
"...but why aren't the benefits of lower production costs being passed on to the consumer?"
Pro Tools might knock a few tens-of-thousands off the cost of producing an album, but the real cost is the producer himself. Good producers can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for a big album. In short, it doesn't matter what tools Puff Daddy uses to produce an album, all that matters is that Puff Daddy produced it.
Why aren't lower production costs being passed on to the consumer? Because they don't have to be. That only happens in a competetive market (I have an econ final tomorrow). One record label isn't going to cut their pruduction costs and start selling CDs at a lower price than the other labels in an attempt to win market share. They're just going to pocket more money. There are two answers why, pick which one you like:
1) The members of the RIAA are illegally conspring to stop competition in their market.
2) Since the music market doesn't sell homogeneous goods, this is just how it works. Only one label sells Britney Spears CDs and they can charge whatever they want becaue nobody else is going to compete directly against them. But a Christina Aguillera album is a subsitute good that people will turn to if the Briney album is too overpriced (I'm going to ace this final tomorrow).
-B
Someone will more than one econ class can chime in now and tell me I'm full of shit.
Apple is not leading the way. They are paying royalties to the same fools who worked so hard to prevent music ever being accessible online.
Herein lies a moral dilemma as I see it. I've long said that if the major labels had offered a good online experience with no copy protection and songs at $1 a pop I would gladly pay. Apple has now done that. However the question I now ask is: "After years of litigation, accusations, predatory pricing, and complete disregard for customers, should I finally return to financing these crooks because after they lost the war they decided to do the right thing?" I suppose the answer is implied in the question. If the RIAA had had the slightest bit of respect for customers it would never have come to this, but quite frankly I've stopped buying music and doubt I'll ever return until someone comes along who cuts the fat cats out of the profits.
ProTools doesn't run itself, not even in the $15,000 version. If too much music is coming out that's over-compressed, sterile, and voice-tuned to hell, then it's the fault of the person sitting at the console -- not the tool.
Almost every time I hear a professional soloist or well-organized group play live music, I can buy a CD from them of their music. Recently I encountered a very good guitar/tambourine player in a restaurant. He didn't have a CD, so I referred my friendly local CD producer to him.
Music production is moving from the expensive studio to the musician's garage. I don't use Pro Tools, and I don't have a sound studio, but I can make a simple demo CD for a music group by mikeing their rehearsal hall for about $500. That's $250 for me and $250 to stamp the CDs commercially. My friendly local CD producer charges more but gets better results. If all you want is a demo or a CD to sell at your gigs you don't need a $100,000 producer.
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
In a competitive market, if you don't lower price in the face of lower costs, your competitor will - and you will lose market share and therefore, ultimately, have a lower profit.
This doesn't really apply for intangible things like music. If you're building widgets for $1000 and selling them for $2000, I can figure out how to make my widgets and sell them for $1500 and blow you away- at least until you make your price cut.
But with music, it's a little different. If stores are selling CD's for $18, of *course* I can make CD's in my home studio and sell them for $3. But who would buy them? People don't buy CD's based on technical features, they buy them because they're buying Madonna(tm) or Backstreet Boys(tm) or Metallica(tm). The music, the name, the image.
We can make our little $3 CD's but people aren't going to buy them in large (comparable to major-label) quantities unless we make genuinely cooler music AND spend a shitload of cash getting radio play and doing promotion. That's really where most of the money major labels spend goes and why CD's cost a lot.
Sure, they might (probably?) have an ungodly profit margin, but it's hard to tell. The point is that unlike a lot of products you can't simply compete with the major labels on "price" and "features" alone...
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
The studio and time for engineers is not that expensive in the grand scheme of things. A gold record, that sells half a million copies, and generally puts the band into debt, not makes them money, will net $5 million if wholesale prices are $10 bucks a shot.
Your studio didn't cost $5 million to build from the ground up. Nowhere even close.
The record companies are using copyright to enslave musicians and steal their work. Period. They're a bunch of bastard middlemen that drive up the price of everything for their own benefit.
You can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in a studio and not come close to putting a major dent in the revenue of a gold record.
Studio costs are not a major factor. It's marketing, payola, promotion, litigation and outright theft (from musicians and consumers) that cause albums to be so highly priced.
Because there is only so many times a week that I can stomach listening to Slashdot's collective indignance about the recording industry and its antics.
Surprise, surprise: advances in technology drive down the costs of production; I'm sure that every aspect of the music business has benefitted from this in some way or another.
Equally unsurprising: We're not seeing any of this money, as the industry is effectively an oligopoly, with high barriers to entry on a national/international level.
And between a) apathy-induced boycotts of major label artists on the grounds of not being very good, and b) illegal distribution of the very little we can be bothered to buy via P2P networks, we'll either remedy the situation through the collapse of recording industry as we know it or make it worse through yet further consolidation of record labels, putting even more power in the hands of the people we despise the most.
God I'm feeling cynical today.
Please remain calm, there is no reason to pani... wait, where are you all going?
What's more, the article talks as though the studio is now obsolete -- as though the mixing decks and equipment were the only importnat part of the studio. One of the major reasons for going to a studio at all is the sound. No matter how good your mic is, if you record it in a square room you get standing waves and all kinds of acoustic crap, making it sound like you did your recording in a bathroom; furthermore, if you're not isolated, you pick up the ventilation system, the whir of the computer fans, and trucks (or ghetto blasters) driving by outside. There's only so much Pro Tools can do to compensate for a crappy input (I know, I've tried).
Studios put a lot of work into making a room tha has good acoustic qualities and is isolated from all nasty bits of noise; designing, building, and maintaining such a room is still an expensive venture, and still necessary for a decent recording.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
when CDs first came out, their outrageous price versus cassettes was justified by the fact that there were only 2 stamping plants in operation. Why didn't they ever go down in price?
Didn't they?
I rarely pay more than $14 for a CD in the year 2003. That's less than the first waves of compact discs went for in the early 1980s -- not even taking into account the past 20 years' worth of devaluation of the dollar due to inflation.
" ...but why aren't the benefits of lower production costs being passed on to the consumer?"
This question deserves an explanation of how record companies finance record production.
First, once an artist has been 'signed' (which essentially means that the record company retains all legal rights to material produced by artist 'x' for a specific duration of output, determined in either number of albums or number of years, contingent on performance, behavior, and sales), the record company then forwards the artist an advance on their future record sales with which to have their album written, produced, tracked, and recorded to a medium.
This forwarded money is expected to be paid back to the record company by the artist once the record is on store shelves, regardless of how many are sold.
Recording artists receive a pittance of record sales revenues, touring revenues, and royalties from radio stations, commercials, and the like for the playing of their songs... remember, the record company had the artist sign a contract which passed those rights onto the record company. Additionally, the record company applies all revenue to the repayment of their loan, and until this has been repaid in full, the artist does not receive any profit.
Many recording artists (take TLC, the female african-american rap group, for instance) make an average salary of $30,000/yr - or less - after paying the record company back for their loan.
This terrible financial arrangement being the case, the only way for recording artists to maximize their revenue potential is to retain a larger portion of the original recording loan, which can then be used to either pay the record company back more readily, or invested to generate its own revenue, etc etc. This being the case, many recording artists turn to commercial recording equipment in order to cut production costs, and actually stand a chance of making money off of their creative material.
Nonsense...
... tape recorders (no live music!) ... soundproof studios (where's the ambience?) ... electric guitars (all the sound is effects) .. microphones (they color the sound!) ... but you'd be wrong .. Pro tools like any other music tech has opened up a lot of possibilities, and popular music aside, I love to hear the things people can do when they start to push the boundaries of those possibilities.
Over-compression is a problem with many recordings, sure, that's not because of Pro Tools. Many amateurs over-compress too, and they have been since they figured out how.
"Voice-tuning" is usually done by a product made by Antares and has nothing to do with Pro Tools. It's available for every other recording software too, and is available as an external box. Auto-Tune is actually used on many recordings these days to clean up the singing. Again, this is the fault of the people using Pro Tools, and has nothing to do with Pro Tools. Pro Tools doesn't do this out of the box (at least, last I used it).
In fact all your complaints have nothing to do with Pro Tools. Popular music was faddish and homogeneous long before Pro Tools.
PT is a great program and turns any machine into a flexible multi-track recorder. It reminds me a lot of Photoshop in that it has a good interface, it helps you get your work done, it opens up huge new possibilities, and certain features of it are cliched and over-used by a lot of folks (are we sick of drop-shadows yet? over-sharpened photos? "funky borders"?)
There's nothing "evil" about PT. It doesn't "do" anything unless someone pushes the buttons and slides the sliders.
You could argue that any music tech is bad
"$495 for the home version or $15,000 for the pro version.
why aren't the benefits of lower production costs being passed on to the consumer?"
Because that's one program. Install it on your Alienware PC and you'll still create terrible sounding crap.
Now pay rent on a building. Properly set it up for acoustics. Add perfectly matched, pro level monitors. Add some seriously expensive sound cards that can work with multiple sources and no lag. Add a set of mics at a couple of grand a pop. Add a mixing desk that connects to pro-tools so you can actually make smooth fine controls. Add a decent guitar/amp (about $5k), now multiply by about five for all the variations used on a typical album. Add a drum kit and a lot of heads (Dave Grohl reportedly got through a set of heads per track when recording Nevermind). Add pro-grade cabling so your sound doesn't get muddied up. Add a PC capable of dealing with it all, fast SCSI drives and all.
Those are just the bits and pieces I can think of, just being an amateur guitarist who never records but does spend too much time in guitar shops. I'd imagine there's a hell of a lot more.
All of a sudden, the $495 seems insignificant. Even the $15,000 for the pro version.
Yes, you can record music with pro-tools and a typical home PC. A lot of people do. And it sounds fairly good compared to recordings of say the 1950s.
Just because one aspect gets a bit cheaper, doesn't mean the process gets cheaper. It just means that the capabilities get higher. I remember paying $200 for 4mb of ram, $3,000 for a 16mhz 286. Now I can get a hundred times that power for about $250 yet I still buy $3,000 PCs. How can that be?
While I think that the initial question posed in the OP has been addressed, I can't help but think that the real impact Pro Tools has had on commercial music is not lower overall production costs.
Like any software tool, Pro Tools can be an excellent way for skilled people to create good things. It can help novices or amateurs (see meaning [1]) develop their skills relatively cheaply. It can also create a whole universe of music that is flat, bland and mind-numbingly the same.
Whenever a particular tool becomes dominant in a field (whether it "deserves" to be dominant or not) it tends to place it's mark on a wide swath of work in that field. I'm thinking particularly of tools like Photoshop and Quark. Anyone who is familar with these tools is usually familar with the standard dreck that is churned out using them.
I've noticed the same trend with Pro Tools. In some ways, Pro Tools can be a bit of a lie: you can get four guys to stand up and belt out a tune and using Pro Tools you can normalize, compress, expand, quantize and otherwise tweak the hell out of the recording and make it sound good. Or at least as good as everything else.
There is a universal sameness to much Pro Tools produced music. Everything is limited to just below peak. Vocals are compressed, doubled and quantized to unearthly degrees. Each instrument is patched through the standard reverbs de rigueur. There are 128 tracks per song not because they are put to good use, but because you can have 128+ tracks per song.
This is not to say that Pro Tools can't be used to make good music. Nobody could say that, just as nobody could really say that Photoshop can't produce good print-ready images. But Photoshop is not a good tool to paint a picture, and Pro Tools does not replace the entire studio and a smart engineer with big ears behind the console.
As a musician, the trick is to know the limitations of your gadgets. Pro Tools will not, and can not, replace old-fashioned tracking, microphone placement, wet/dry mixes, or human-tuned compression.
The success of Pro Tools has created the Pro Tools sound, and one that I am not overly fond of. As music in the digital domain matures, I hope and expect we will move away from overuse of any single tool. This seems to be the history of popular music, anway.
-- clvrmnky
Bunk.
An "anti-ProTools movement" if successful would take inexpensive music-making tools out of the hands of exactly the "real musicians" you want to hear. Those people are making music at home, in basements, in tiny studios, with a generation of affordable tools that level the recording playing field in the same way the web has helped to level the publishing playing field.
BTW, I'm recording a choir tonight with a tiny DAT deck and mics and earplug headphones that all fit in my pockets and run on 2 AA batteries and will make a recording that will sound better than many CDs in the stores. I'm darned happy all this stuff is out there and affordable.
Apple is doing something that the RIAA thinks is good, but in reality, I think it's the surest sign that they're dying.
Their profit margins are sky-high because they bundle content. You want that hit song? Sure, with these 14 crap songs, all at just over a buck each.
On a song-by-song basis, they'll make more money selling songs now, with electronic distribution. But they won't sell any copies of the 14 crap songs. They'll go from 40% or so (what I've heard is label profit from a $20 CD) of $20, for one good song, to 60% of a dollar (assuming they keep all the gains from cutting out physical distribution and don't give any extra to the artist - a safe assumption).
They're also cutting the throats of their retail partners. They need to own retail completely to keep their monopoly control. If they betray retail, retail is going to betray them. Selling indie music, not price-fixing, all these terrible things.
This helps the consumer because, assuming we buy, we're buying more quality music and less crap. (Quality meaning, what we want, not any objective standard.) We're getting it at a much lower price, and there's no brand loyalty. We'll shop at Apple because they're the only one, for now, but as soon as another site offers it we'll jump ship for $.02 savings. There'll be fan sites listing the price differences at the sales sites.
They'll have done what they always fought against, turned their music into an uncontrollable commodity. Sure, they'll get paid for each track, but their fantastic profits are gone. With that goes their huge advertising budgets and all of a sudden it's reasonable for other companies to compete in the publishing/promotions business.