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?"

Comments

Um, maybe

[kalidasa]

because the bands pay production costs most of the time. Here's a better question: 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?

ProTools is a large reason modern music sucks

[Faggot]

ProTools, while of course being immensely powerful and featureful, is responsible for many pervasive problems with modern music:

• over-compression of everything (ever notice how most modern music is the same volume all the time?)
  
• voice-tuning (as debuted by Cher on "Love After Life"). able to make a crappy singer perfectly on-key, and since it's matured a little it's much harder to notice
  
• lifelessness resulting from using the "best" parts of a recording session (a riff here, a drum fill there, a bassline there) to collage together a song. the resultant music is (surprise!) devoid of the life which comes from musicians interacting with each other
  
• the same effects make it into modern songs at the same time. unoriginal overuse of ProTools plugins

it's depressing how such a featureful tool is used mainly for evil.

Re:ProTools is a large reason modern music sucks

[Mr_Dyqik]

I'm sure similar things happened when Les Paul invented multitracking.

I think that it now needs different qualities in a producer to get good results with Pro Tools than it did to record with old style big desks etc., although the techniques haven't changed that much. Pro Tools essentially simulates using a very big and expensive studio in software, so you can do everything that very expensive studios have been doing for years. It does automate some of these things though, so that there is a temptation to over use some things.

Just using Pro Tools doesn't mean that recordings suffer from the afflictions that you've listed (listen to Martin Grech's "Open Heart Zoo" for a recording which certainly isn't over-compressed, and was recorded on Pro Tools, with just two instrumentalists).

Pro Tools is allowing my brother to record almost an entire album, where he plays almost all of the instruments (not the drums, but only because he has a drummer available, he can play drums), for the cost of a computer and the software/hardware, in his bedroom, and get a better sound than most people managed in the 1980's (from a technical point of view, I'm not diss'ing the 80's sound).

Re:ProTools is a large reason modern music sucks

[onepoint]

Amazing, you post the best response about issues using PT.

People don't realize that the best music comes from band interaction. the WHO who's music will live for a long time.. there band had a huge interaction amoung each other. same for Rush, Metalica and other very popular bands that feed off each other while creating music.

but to the topic, the money is fronted to the band, the band then is required to produce the tracks. how they produce the tracks is not related to the lable, if anything they should be able to produce more tracks for the album because studio time will be less and the artist keeps more of the advance.

They have one themselves too:

[delphi125]

http://www.digidesign.com/ptfree/

http://www.digidesign.com/ptfree/ptfree_qa.html

Free as in beer, obviously, and limited, but hey - beer good!

Re:Why? Hmmm.... let me think

[PacketCollision]

Despite the natural reaction to such a thread (I mean who doesn't want to bash the recording industry?) the fact of the matter is that studios are still very expensive. Add to Protools (which, in the configurations I've worked with, could easily cost over $30,000) all the other gear, and a studio can easily cost in the 100s of thousands to build. A good recording engineer isn't cheap either, nor is a good mixdown engineer. The best mixdown engineers cost several hundred an hour. All the design for the cover, etc. isn't free either, nor is mastering, nor are musicicans, for that matter. That, and as the parent post stated, there are many costs that aren't related to the production.

All but the most popular albums don't even make much money (for the artests at least), where they make their money is off radio-play, which goes to the artists, not the label. But even this isn't free - you need a publicist to get your work out.

All in all, the buisness isn't as easy as sitting down in front of a computer with some software. There is a complex set of variables, and making the statement that with the advent of ProTools, albums should cost less is a gross oversimplification.

Re:Why? Hmmm.... let me think

[blamanj]

OK, recording studios are very expensive. However, film studios are even more expensive and the costs of making a movie exceed the costs of making a record by an order of magnitue. But you can get some DVDs at prices lower than that of a music CD.

Re:Why? Hmmm.... let me think

[Stickster]

Films recoup costs in both the theater and on video. They also recoup through deals for cable and "big 4" network broadcast, as well as for exhibition on airlines and such. For blockbusters there's also marketing tie-in deals. None of these things really apply for music albums... yet.

Re:Why aren't savings passed along?

[Zenin]

Exactly. With the exception of really old music, no two record companies ever sell the exact same album and most all have exclusive deals to everything a group produces (for a set number of albums or such, but effectively years). There is no competition in art.

What's needed is some system where the laws of the open market can be applied to an artform. One method might be to (drastically) reapply the first performance rules to apply simiarly to the actual publication of albums. The idea might go something like this:

• Original production company gets exclusive first pressing rights for one year from start of publication.
• After one year, any other pressing company can press and sell the exact same recording (minus box art and such, but titles are the same).
• These second run pressing companies pay resonable and fixed royalties to both the musician and the production company of $1 per album each (if track list is sold unchanged) or $.25/song otherwise (to each, not split).
• Online pressing rights are identical to second run pressing of real CDs with reguard to these rules.

The above idea is also very similar to the Brand Name/Generic Name drug markets (albeit with much shorter timelines, for obvious reasons). Record companies could still make their money hand over fist for new albums as they do now, AND not only cover the cost of bust albums with the high price of star albums, but they could use each other's older catalogs in open market form to help offset those costs as well. -And of course, if some other pressing company sells one of your albums, you get royalties as well, so your bust albums could even help offset your bust albums if/when someone else manages to sell them better then you. Furthermore it would open up a new business of the pressing company (which again could likely be an online only store, like Apple is doing, but without needing to cut deals with everyone under the sun, allowing startups to compete in a big player world).

Honestly I just pulled this idea out of my ass, but the more I reread my own idea the more I like it. Anyone see any major flaws in this thinking?

you will find your answers here

[mr_burns]

the mixerman chronicles:

http://www.prosoundweb.com/recording/mm/week1/mm .p hp

This has by far been the most read and loved diary of an engineer on a major label project. It might take you a few days, but you will be entertained!

Plus you will learn that one workflow improvement for one cog in this machine doesn't amount to a hill of beans as far as what it take to get the whole project firing on all cylinders.