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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?"
the benefits aren't being passed on so that the industry can maximize profit margins. Old skool.
Word.
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.
Let Apple lead the way.
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
Here is a Link to the people who make Pro Tools.
--sig fault--
Because you gotta pay for all that COWBELL, baby!
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.
...and while it does make some good points about cheap, home-brewed recording (whether Pro Tools or not) it doesn't take into account:
Using said studios
Hiring people to mix, master, and produce albums
Advertising and promotion
Paying everyone associated with the album in a fair manner aside from the artist
The fact Hilary Rosen does not have enough money.
I am not who I say you are.
THere's an open source tool that I just started playing with called Protux that just happens to be very similar to protools, but has a smooth keyboard and mouse interface. So... I guess the point of this post is that for $495 you can get the industry standard but for $0 you can get the "free" and "almost function complete-similar" tool that you could contribute $500 worth of work into to make better... IMHO a better deal :)
.: 2+2 = PI SQRT(1+N)
most $ the record companies spend covers marketing and their losses on the releases that fail (which is somewhere around 9 out of 10).
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?
Actually I do a lot of recording myself, and I've never used pro tools before, although I have heard great things.
If you are looking for a good alternative to pro tools, I am quite happy with my Tascam US-428 (http://www.tascam.com) and Cool Edit Pro 2.0(Multitrack recording)(http://http://www.syntrillium.com/)..
Infact, I just recorded an eight track demo for my friends who are in a little band, and I can tell you the quality is pretty damn good compared to the price of recording in most studios(Some run about $100 an hour). Anyway, thats my two cents.
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.
I don't want to start a flame war, because I pretty much hate the recording industry, but there are a lot more costs involved in recording than just Pro Tools.
First, you need a good way to get that audio into your computer, and these are still expensive. The newest consumer level Pro Tools mixing board costs about $1500 and can mix 8 sources at a time. The price of larger boards increases exponentially. A professional audio DAT drive ain't cheap, and, most importantly, TO GET A HIGH QUALITY RECORDING YOU NEED A STUDIO. Good quality sound absorbers aren't cheap.
My point is, and let the flames begin, that there are still a lot of costs to sound recording. Also, the cost of producing an album isn't why they're so expensive. If that was true, CD costs would have fell when they became cheap to produce.
How else are they going to pay for J-Lo's insurance?
it's depressing how such a featureful tool is used mainly for evil.
But what do I know. I'm just looking for anonymous gay sex.
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.
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.
The key point here is that, sadly, the record industry does not really represent a competitive market....
Even with the slickest low cost hard disk recording system, there are still several other important items involved in making a good sounding recording.
... well like you used cheap mics.
1.) Microphones: It's very easy to spend $30K on mics for drums alone. Using cheap mics makes things sound like
2.) Recording Space: Without an Acoustically good space in which to record, it's easy to end up with a real thin "inside a tin can" sound.
3.) Engineer/Producer: Even in a high-end pro studio, results will be poor without some talented people running things (both technically and aesthetically.) Pro tools systems work especially well for electronica/hip-hop/modern r&b where real recording of real instruments are rare, but to get a really professional sound out of a live band, there are very few alternatives to spending some serious (sure less serious than even 10-15 years ago) money.
... also, I can kill you with my brain.
Here is a link to a Potential Free Software Alternative, Ardour
(at least it's being worked on, anyway)
http://ardour.sourceforge.net/.
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.
http://www.digidesign.com/ptfree/ptfree_qa.html
Free as in beer, obviously, and limited, but hey - beer good!
Yes, most albums are produced on Pro-Tools, which is a very good piece of software. As a matter of fact, the company that makes it offers a free version (anything below win2k and OS9 only). But saying that Pro-Tools in inexpensive, therefore albums should be cheaper is like saying the a hammer builds a house, and hammers are cheap, so I should be able to build a house cheap. Pro-Tools is a tool. The most expensive parts of album creation are the musicians (yes, most artists still use actual musicians, and that includes rap artists), and the producers. A good producer will cost hundreds of dollars an hour, plus expenses. The producer will also get a piece on the backend. Also, there is the process of Mastering, which is done using a lot of outboard gear. Mastering can be very expensive.
But with that said, Pro-Tools is the Avid of audio editing (Avid is the most popular brand of professional video editing software and equipment). If you are interested in audio tracking, then definitely check it out.
Passing the saivngs on to the consumer is a realtive issue. There are records youc an buy that were recorded on a traditional studio setup but which are somehow still only $8 from your local independent record store. Conversely, you can have items like "Bread You Off," from the latest Roots record - this song alone cost $300k - why? the licensing for the samples. a-ha! The truth is that there are way more players taking their cut than just the labels and the bands. take it from someone who knows!
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RKauffman s.e.c.r.e.t.m.e.d.i.a.g.r.o.u.p
Sorry if I seem rude, but that sounds like a stupid question. When you factor in studio time for recording, the cost of a decent producer, production of cds, marketing, etc, etc, etc, the *one time* cost of your mixing software is pretty much nil. If the billing department at your local garage switched to linux from windows, would you expect them to charge you less for an oil change? Hell no. Lower costs equals greater profit. This is basic business here. Just because it's the recording industry, doesn't mean we should be angry. They do a lot of vile, underhanded things, but this isn't one of them.
do not read this line twice.
The only thing cheapening production equipment does is allow for a lot of un-talented musicians to create cheap sounding music and upload it to mp3.com where it collects dust.
I believe that the money invested in producing a quality CD is not spent on gear, its spent on the labor involved. Record labels don't go out and buy new production equipment everytime they sign a new band - they line up studio time with whatever producers and engineers fit within their budget. Those producers and engineers don't use the cheap version of pro-tools. Along with the super-expensive version, they use racks and racks of expensive analog equipment which (according to them) sounds a million times better than all of the digital plugin crap polluting the market. Personally I'm not sure that it sounds "better" - but I do know that every piece of analog gear they use has a unique sound that their ears have grown intimately familiar with over the period of many years, and thus they must continue to use that gear to get the sound they want. Since those guys are the driving force behind the major label albums, there's no reason why the cheap-gear market would have any effect on their studio costs.
The cheapening of the production equipment isn't all bad, because for every 1000 or 2000 pipe-dream consumers who think they can produce the next Britney Spears album by simply shelling out $600 for the latest software, there are 1 or 2 dedicated musicians who wisely invest in the equipment thats going to be with them for the next several years while their skills mature.
The only reason it seems like gear has become more affordable is because the industry has realized that if they sufficiently cheapen the quality (aka price) of their gear, they gain access to an entire market of wishful thinking wanna-be rockstars and dj's who wouldn't know what a good sound was if it tore through their eardrums.
Hasn't anyone here seen American Idol?
There are a couple of ways you can approach the idea of recorded music. As a musician, youc an either try to make it sound as close as possible to a live performace as possible - or you can take the flexibility and creative potential afforded by technology and create something that reflects a particular refinement of vision, if not an accurate reproduction of live performance. As a recording artist and technologist, I can see it both ways.
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RKauffman s.e.c.r.e.t.m.e.d.i.a.g.r.o.u.p
Because instead of having 4 studios that are full purposed, folks build their own studios and spend the money on their own equipment than they would have normally at the big boys.
:-) What kind of studios are they going to be running? Ones that are $100k - 300k in just equipment.
In the end, it STILL costs the industry the same amount of money or probably more.
That and the human element has gone up steadily as the pricing of the hardware has gone down. before the Home Recording Revolution occured, I was able to charge $20 an hour to show up and help someone with their gear...generally I was paid for by the studio I was in. NOW I show up at someones home, read the manual to them and charge them $75 an hour and I'm not even what I'd call professional (I've worked with several professional artists in the past and I'm going to be the head music tech for an up coming Al Green show next month, so I work with folks that are VERY professional...still pretty much a hobby for me so I can support my university and its research addiction).
And what happens AFTER folks finish their home opus? They generally head to the bigger studios to polish it up. Producers are going to ask a LOT of front money to work on this -- along with their own engineers that retrack certain items -- and they will STILL ask for points (though that generally comes out of the artists share...EVERYTHING comes out of the artists share
Looking at my HOME studio, I have 2 K2600s ($5500 each), Digital Mixer ($3k), Mac G4 ($3k), PC ($1k)Audio Interfaces for both Macs and PCs ($2k), Software (DAW -- Logic Audio $1k / Softsynths & Effects $2k). Thats almost $25k right there (Heh! Glad most of this was comped as I couldn't afford it). There is NO WAY IN HELL that Vig's entire studio is $15k at Stone tries to make out...I wouldn't be surprised to know it was on order of $150k at the MINIMUM.
BTW the $500 version of the CHEAP Protools is NOT Protools...its a cheap immitation with the same interface. its designed solely as a learning tool to get folks use to what the big boys use and hooked so that they can go into the studio with a little preknowledge OR convince them to buy the more expensive stuff.
Theres no doubt about it, recording a major label album is going to cost a lot of money. Indie albums will be MUCH less.
Don't take my word for it, I run one of the largest Logic user groups dedicated to digital audio. Take a look at:
http://community.sonikmatter.com
and check out our user forums. These folks know what they are doing and we have quite a few folks that have worked on albums that have resulted in precious metal on the wall. Again, I'm just a hobbiest that been caught up with the big boys because I was a geek when they needed technology taken care of and don't consider myself to be anywhere near their calibre -- but its a fucking shame to see that my bedroom studio is bigger and better than Butch Vig's if we are going to take this article at face value.
clif marsiglio
cofounder sonikmatter
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.
I just moved into a new apartment. The rent here is lower. I was thinking that the honest thing to do would be to tell my employer that since I now have an extra hundred bucks every month that maybe I should take a pay cut, since I don't want to appear greedy. Any thoughts?
do not read this line twice.
Production budget for My Big Fat Greek Wedding: $5,000,000
Production budget for Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers: $94,000,000
I bet tickets were the same price to see each one in a first run theater. The cost of entertainment (well, anything really, but especially entertainment) is based on perceived value. The cost is however much people are willing to pay for it. The only way I see this bringing down the cost of CDs is that it is so much easier for an individual to set up a recording studio of their own and put out high quality (not quite professional quality, but much closer than a 4-track cassette recorder) music for a price that drastically undercuts the RIAA based music.
With today's software and fast computers, it's amazing the quality of stuff that can be put out with just a couple good mics, some time, and a good/creative ear.
The lowers costs aren't passed on to the customer because . . . they never are. No business ever voluntarily passes on cost savings. They'll only do it in the face of competition or regulation, and the record companies are acting more like a cartel than an industry.
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.
So yeah, there are a lot of programs that do this. But Pro Tools is, and has been for a decade, the industry standard in professional hard disk recording systems. Some great things you can do with a Pro Tools setup:
The basic thing is, Rolling Stone is finally catching on to the what musicians have been doing in the mainstream for about 7 years now, and that's completely tapeless recording, and the move of recording out of the studio and into other places. There are enough plugins out there to clean up sound from even very noisy areas, so the need for a completely silent "studio" is much less. Studios are definitely going out of business as a result of this move to home-studio-based recording, and ProTools is generally a compatability requirement.
Me, I use Cakewalk Sonar at home, and this is one area where no free software product yet comes close. I'm on the Ardour mailing list, and use Ardour periodically to see how it's coming along, but definitely nothing there yet to replace my studio setup.
So to answer your question, Pro Tools is simply one of many hard-disk recording packages. However, among professionals it is the most widely used, and boasts a much larger library of compatible software than any competitor. Oh, and until about 4 years ago, it was Mac-only.
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write
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?
I work in a pro audio shop called Atlanta Pro Audio (shameless plug). Saying that cheaper hardware has reduced the cost of an album is just like saying the reduced cost of computer hardware has lessened the expense of developing software.
.75 to 2 million dollar range.
It is true that Pro Tools has made the hardware costs of getting a *demo* out pretty cheap, but to say that the pro version only costs $15,000 is an untrue statement. If you really want to cut an album that will be suitable to SEND to a real mastering house, you will spend $50,000 at the very least. And if you want the little Mbox for $450, you still need a computer ($1,500), and plug-ins ($2,000), and keyboards ($2,000), and instruments ($MUCHO), and outboard gear ($MEGAMUCHO), and mics ($1000)...
Audio engineers are still expensive. Producers are expensive. Getting a record mastered, and I guarantee everything you've heard on the radio has been mastered, is *very* expensive. Mastering houses still have equipment in the
All of this is still irrelevant. Payola still runs the music industry. I have heard it from more than one of our customers that if you have a million dollars for advertising, you have a gold record.
" ...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.
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:
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?
My
Production costs are so high still because, in part, of the fact that the people working in the studio are skilled and well compensated professionals. Wait, I know!! If you want cheaper CDs lets move music production to India!!
...still cost as much or more than they ever did.
Cheap audio production is just *slowing* the increase, not a source of cost reduction.
but why aren't the benefits of lower production costs being passed on to the consumer?
On this planet the recording industry is pretty well known for being
greedy. I feel they have been ripping me off for years. When CD's came out they cost twice what an LP or Cassette did. They said that was because they had to build new plants to produce CD's and as soon as they were built and the quantities went up the prices would come down. Well maybe I blinked and missed it, but I never saw a major reduction and I think $18.99 for a single album is outrageous. I refuse to pay that much for a CD. I usually wait and try to find it in the cut-out or used bins.
A few years ago I was involved in a business that sold used CD's and we did some new CD's. From the distributor we could buy new releases for around $12 and super savers were around $10. I am guessing that the distributor only made a dollar or two so that means that the record company was getting $8-$10 per unit. From having checked into producing a CD I could have one made with quantites of 1000 for less than 2$. Therefore I would bet that they can produce the CD's for less than $1 for quantites > 10,000. So lets say they make $8 per cd. To me that's a pretty good profit margin.
I'm also under the impression that they rip the (non-superstar)
artists off.
Bottom Line: I'm not holding my breath waiting for a little savings on production costs to be passed back to me.
"$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?
Another reason is the excellent plug-in system. There are hundreds of plug-in modules that can do just about anything you could imagine to audio. You can even write your own plug-ins if you like.
Many people would be quite shocked as I was to see the AutoTune plug-in work for the first time. I have watched an engineer friend of mine raise and lower pitches of parts of notes to bring them in tune (which is an art form itself). This gives engineers and producers the ability to exercise a "record now fix later" production process at their discretion. There was a time not too long ago when the artist really had to be able to sing well in the studio. Now they can get pretty close and it will be fixed later.
There are many audio packages out there that sport similar features but the real answer to your question is that there is an extremely high level of quality associated with the entire system that is lacking in many mid and consumer level audio packages. Every part of a ProTools system is designed from the ground up to create pro level production quality audio.
(There used to be something clever here.)
These savings aren't passed on to the consumer simply because the consumer has never paid these costs to begin with. Most standard recording give the artist an advance to produce their album, varying in amount based on the artist, the label, etc. This money is recoupable, paid back by the artist in full to the record label. If the label advances $50,000, the first $50,000 in sales (should the artist ever hit that point) goes to the record label. Only at that point does the artist begin to see profit.
As for ProTools being the cause of all music's woes, it is only a tool. Handing a chimp a paintbrush certainly won't make him Rembrandt. Over-compression is simply a bad production value, compounded by radio compression, or MP3 compression in some cases. ProTools is certainly capable of dynamics. Voice pitch correction? This isn't included in ProTools, when I last looked. There are other companies that provide pitch correcting plugins, but if you rely on those, you shouldn't be singing. Overdubs have been happening for years, since the advent of multi-track recording (Thanks, Les Paul!).
And Frankly, if a full featured ProTools system could be had for $15k, I'd own one by now.
As the cost of political campaigns goes up, it takes more money to buy a senator these days. The RIAA has to own senators in order to infringe on any rights of consumers that it *THINKS* hurts profit margins, so they must keep more money.
Besides, the RIAA thinks 9 out of 10 songs are pirated anyway, so they are just recouping losses.
Get with the program, buddy. Work. Pay Taxes. Consume. Repeat.
From the chronicles of Mixerman: (good read, funny)
my associative arrays can kick your hash - TCL
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.
pro tools doesnt necessarily cut overall time / cost. it saves a ton of time in the actual recording process, but the real benefit of a good producer is helping the bands make better songs. pro tools just gives the band / producer more time with that
Beacuse labels often own, or have "agreements" with more traditional studios, and going back to the heads saying "You know all that shit we spent 2 million on 4 years ago? It's outdated." People HATE being wrong, especially with money, and even more so when there jobs depend on it. So while a large portion of recordings are possibly edited in Pro Tools, it's become more of an "add-on" for existing "physical studios". Another thing to keep in mind is that production cost is primarily a "service fee", ie cost the the producer himself, the mastering, the engineer, etc. Their time has, and will always be the most valuable/expensive asset, and irregardless of wether their setup costs $500,000 or $25,000 THEIR TIME will likely never change. Sure, there are great plug-ins that save time, but why should the Suits ever know about this? Just because they could do something in an hour that used to take them 5 doesn't mean they will - and believe me, I know guys like this, and they won't lose there livlihood to a few CD-Roms.
Keep in mind we have no idea how to run the program in the first place.
So, why should I have to pay $20 a CD? I realize with more instruments, there would be more work to do, but this really says a lot: Production is overrated.
I've been backing away from idealism lately, but I honestly think that once more and more amateur musicians get these sorts of programs, it will become common knowledge that it honestly is NOTHING to record decent-sounding music. A professional will be able to make the final touches that Jasbir and I could never make. However, even assuming that this person is salaried at $200,000 a year, this DOES NOT JUSTIFY THE PRICE OF MUSIC.
End of rant.
HI, MY NAME IS ISAAC.
ptfree is not the same as protools - ptfree is limited in the number of audio and midi channels, does not work with any of the digidesign hardware, and has limited plugin usage
i o_Menu.htm
read more
http://www.digidesign.com/ptfree/ptfree_qa.html
in general, the midi implementation in protools is limited compared to emagic's logic audio
other really good music production suites that won't break the home studio bank
Tracktion
Fruity Loops
Reason
some electronic music producers who use the big software tools occasionally screw around with the cheaper packages and then show how you can make the original song using them - such is the case with Infected Mushroom's "Dancing with Kadafi"
http://www.infected-mushroom.net/Studio/Html/Stud
I'm an avid home studio type. I've got a 24-track studio (based around a Mackie MDR24 - disk-based recorder) and I have the Mackie 32-channel 8-bus console and a nice modest collection of outboard stuff and mic-pre's... which is to say that I generally prefer to record using a separate machine and relying more on performance rather than editing capabilities of the engineer in order to record good music (which means I rarely record anything "good" -- but its fun trying).
I do, however, believe there is a place for ProTools (and Ardour -- the open source PT). I'm slowly warming up to the whole "PC" based recording, but more for the editing flexibility you are provided with. In the past, "editing" was just simply cutting out blatant mistakes, but now with the tools and capabilities with PC-based recording programs... editing, for me, now is part of the creative process (and not just clean-up).
As for the "over-compression" discussion earlier, yes most modern MAINSTREAM music suffers from over use of compression. My philosophy is that music should breathe. When I hear stuff today, I just notice myself repeating over and over "just let it breathe!!" Compression is a useful tool for taiming a wild snare hit or shaping a guitar track, but it should ALWAYS be considered completely TRANSPARENT.
Oh well, what do I know.
sad robot making broken music
Well, the over-compression issued mentioned by grand-parent is seriously encouraged by ProTools... ProTools does not do logarhythmic metering - it does linear metering. As a result, 3 dB down from full amplitude (which is 1/2 the power) is 1/2 of the range in the edit window for a track. Down 6 dB is 1/4. Down 9 dB is 1/8. Down 12 dB is 1/16th of the window - and that's the average volume you SHOULD be at (for pop... SMPTE standard is to go down to -18 dB FS for 0 VU). However, do that, and it barely looks like you've recorded anything. As a result, ProTools users are encouraged to record too hot, with too much compression/limiting.
That's just ONE of the flaws of ProTools (can we say clicks and pops due to not finding zero crossings or doing automatic crossfades? yeah...)
-T
the mixerman chronicles:
m .p hp
http://www.prosoundweb.com/recording/mm/week1/m
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.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
Look at it two ways:
o rg
1. People who never could afford to record before now can.
2. You can get lots and lots and lots of LEGAL music for free, because of those lowered costs.
If I had to pay for a studio every time I wanted to record something... well I wouldn't.
http://www.somesongs.com
http://www.songfight.
Free music by real people.
However, check out Audacity for a good, free, cross-platform product.
-T
Hey... thanks for using the proper term. Today, all the S/W-only n00bs all think it is vocoRder just because the plugin makers didn't use the proper vernacular. The original effect was produced by what was called a vocoder. It should be noted that the obvious pitch-shifting was the *desired* effect. Similar in some respects to how one used the "talk box" to turn the shape of the oral cavity into a parametric EQ sweep for the output of a guitar amp, then fed into a vocal mic. Nice to know someone out there remembers the good ol' days.
Can I bum a sig? I left mine at the office.
I just happened to be in the studio (and have one more trip there on Saturday) and we recorded with ProTools. Now I'm not an expert on audio recording, and much of the credit for the recording quality goes to the engineer (and my band), but ProTools seems like an amazingly capable program. Not only could the engineer apply get a rich, warm sound in all the right places, but he could do this quickly!
We were sitting in the engineering room, listening to a recording and thinking aloud what doesn't sound quite right, and the engineer kept up with our train of thought. By the time the song was done, he had applied most of our ideas to the song and we listened to it a second time, with everything as it should be.
I suppose I should provide a link to the song, even though I'm not sure if I'm pimping or backing up my opinion: Flipside - it's where your secrets went to hide!
If a tool like this can make such a great sound, the super-high-end systems may be answering a question nobody has asked in ten years.
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
This is a market where competition is skewed -- the goods aren't fungible. In fact, the very popularity of a good in this market increases its value, exactly at the same time as reducing its per unit cost to produce (longer production runs), market (amortized over more units), etc.
So, I would not expect lower production costs to change prices from major labels. What this DOES do, though, is to enable micro-producers to actually become economical. I.e., you can buy good music from small artists at lower cost.
I use a program called Buzz for composing and recording electronic music. It and a ton of plugins are available for free download. (Windows only, no Linux or Mac ports...yet) Also check out this site.
You can also find lots of free plugins and other apps at Database Audio.
I can't believe that we have the opening comment be so crass. ProTools is a tool. It doesn't force anyone to use loads of compression; it doesn't force anyone to autotune vocals; it doesn't force anyone to make endless edits and nit-pick the soul out of a performance. A pro-level PT system might just be the best thing ever for recording live music. Low noise, great headroom, and the ability to do some very useful EQ and gain adjustments in the mix and master phase. The Problem: The music industry dictates that if you want people to buy a million units of their latest pap then it has to be of a certain style. That is why you hear the same crappy production values on Korn albums as you hear on Dixie Chicks albums. Sweeet, Sweeeet pap, and loads of it. Music doesn't suck any worse now than it did before digital recording, it is just that us Old-Timers (30+) have a new villain to blame it on. The question was about why the benefit hasn't come across to the consumer in the form of lower prices. Well, the cost of everything has come down, with the exception of management and procuder salaries. They have skyrocketed. CD's cost pennies to manufacture, distribution is cheaper than ever, recording equipment has dropped in price against inflation, and still the artists don't expect to make any money from their CD. I've seen four interviews (on MTV, VH1, A&E, etc...)with artists from varying genres where they have said that despite selling a million CD's they only make money from touring. Speaking of the Dixie Chicks, I saw the interview where one of them is almost intears when the interviewer does the math of CD sales * shelf price. She bluntly relates that Sony remodeled their entire Nashville offices and studios on their sales reciepts. Amazing considering that RIAA is using the artists as poster children for their jihad against music sharing. What PT *is* doing is making high-quality recording equipment available to more independent musicians. Not just inexpensive PT systems, but inexpensive analog systems dumped by studios who went to PT! I can get 24-track analog (tape, remember tape?) time for a tenth of what it would have cost 10 years ago. Have you seen any other technology service drop from $3k/day to $300/day since 1993? Plus, I can put together a really nice home digital system for under $3k using either PTLE or any of a gaggle of DAW solutions. PT could be considered to be like Starbucks, while there is one on every corner there is also a competitor on every other corner.
There's an argument running through this discussion which on the surface is coherent, yet in practice doesn't reflect reality. It goes like this:
"there is no alternative to brand X, and only one company sells brand X, so there is no viable competition. Therefore, the company can set pretty much any price it wants."
Yep, in a very basic, Econ 101 way of thinking, this is entirely true - up to a point, of course (i.e., where price exceeds consumer desire to purchase). If you have no viable competition you're in a monopoly position (corporate oligarchy, for the RIAA) and you can price fix all you like. So long as you don't raise the price beyond what the consumer will bear you can rake in the profit every time production costs decline.
What folks are missing is that competition isn't limited to these simplistic factors. As price approaches the limit that the consumer will bear, alternate methods of distribution will be developed to satisfy the desires of consumers who wish to purchase the product, but not at the price set by the monopoly. These are known as 'black markets' because they distribute the product without the sanction of the monopoly (and in contravention to law) and at a lower price than the monopoly itself (for goods that *can* be distributed at all - obviously, SAMs and the like will cost more just because distribution exists at all).
The more 'unjust' the price of a product is gauged to be, the larger and more developed a black market becomes. That is, each time you jack up the price of the product (or refuse to lower the price, when production costs decline), more and more of your consumers pass the point where the price is something they're willing to bear - whether or not they can afford the price. If percentage A of consumers find a CD ridiculously overpriced at $15 a pop, this percentage will turn to the black market for its needs. If percentage B of consumers find the price of the CD too much at $16, now percentage A + percentage B turns to the black market, and so on, minus those who simply stop purchasing in any form whatsoever.
(Note: there will also be a certain subset of consumers who find the only acceptable price to be 0. But unlike what many slashdotters seem to believe, in practice this subset is always tiny and has no observable effect on the market for that product. This isn't speculation, it's fact - do some research if you need it spelled out for you. People aren't by nature thieves, and an enormous amount of economic and psychological evidence bears this out; if you think otherwise, this isn't a statement about the character of the human race, but your character.)
The higher the price goes, and the more unjust that price seems to be, the more your consumers turn to the black market instead of buying from the monopoly. This has nothing to do with ethics or morals regardless of what ranting slashdotter decides to scream 'theft!' in response to this post. The fact is, increasing consumer use of the black market is an economic indicator that the product is overpriced and needs to be reduced in cost to the consumer. It's the economic form of 'civil disobedience'; when the powers that be don't listen to your complaints, you take action that hits them where it counts to drive your point home. Even if you yourself are unaware of the results of your actions (you just want cheaper CDs and don't care about the ramifications), from an economic point of view the group that turns to the black market is making a very clear statement about the price of the product provided by the monopoly, whether or not the individuals of that group care a whit one way or another about anything beyond buying the CD for less than the list price.
Unfortunately for the RIAA, there exists a 'black market' in the form of file sharing that makes turning to an alternative distribution source easier than ever before in history. While short-sighted twerps post on slashdot, going on and on about 'stealing' and 'piracy' and whatnot, this
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
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... should I finally return to financing these crooks because after they lost the war they decided to do the right thing?
Of course not! A Slashdoter would never actually purchase something. No, a true Slashdoter would say "I sure would be willing to pay for (Goods/Services) if they would only (Criteria to be met)," then change those criteria once met so that they still feel they should not pay for said goods or services.
Sorry, this rant isn't directed at you in particular, but I've seen it alot on here recently, esp. with the advent of Apple's Music Store:
"I'll buy music online when you don't have to buy the whole crappy album."
"$0.99 a song? What a rip off! The whole CD would cost more than it would in the stores."
"Oh, only $9.99 for a whole album? Too bad I only have a Windows box"
"Oh, the Windows client is coming out at the end of the year? (Pause) WELL THEY DON'T SUPPORT OGG, SO THEY'LL NEVER GET MY MONEY!!!"
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?
Obviously, you don't understand the problem.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Yeah, $500 for "a professional recording studio that used to cost tens to hundreds of thousands" is major cost reduction. Unfortunately, the above quote (I made it up) is basically, like nearly every software program's hype, full of omissions.
Like what you have to buy to get the program to work. Let's start with a computer, in the interest of brevity.
Any old computer? Nope. How about my brand-new multigahertz PC wonder? Probably not. You have to run it on a ProTools approved system. One reason why a whole bunch of audio is still done with Macs; once it's all said and done, Macs and PCs for audio (at this level) cost the same, maybe even less.
Like all the other stuff you have to buy. Including ProTools hardware; a bunch of extra software, and the rest of the stuff that makes a recording studio what it is. Singers are blowing through microphones that cost thousands of dollars and explode if you look at them funny (well, maybe not that easy; singing too close, or dropping them even once, maybe a hard bump, that will do it. Spend $5K).
Wages, wages, wages. Heat, rent, electricity. A cable inventory that's worth more than your car. You know, the usual stuff. When it comes right down to it, you could get the software for free* and it still wouldn't make much difference in the bill.
Now, many musicians are on the edge and do some great things with (only) many thousands of dollars invensted. Don't expect to see their efforts in a major label release though; if they get signed the record company is going to send them back to do it again, with the big buck guys. And yes, you can hear the difference.
As to the question why the product hasn't gone down in price, the answer is it has. I used to pay $10-16 for LP records. According to this inflation calculator, that translates as $33.73 to $53.96 (1975-2000, US). I won't go into about how the music industry has been trying to get us to pay $25 since the early 80's, suffice to say consumer resistance has tended to curb their periodic attempts to raise the retail price.
* Get ProTools Free direct from Digidesign here (Win98/Me & MacOS9): Digidesign It will run on less critical hardware, and is a functional but somewhat limited version of the paid programs. Don't expect your next CD to cost $0 to finish.
Read the System Requirements here:
Windows XP
For those of you who would rather not click the link here's an example (there's a lot of requirements, but whatever):
The only fully approved CPU's are Compaq EVO W2000, an IBM Intellistation M Pro model 6850 or Intellistation Z Pro model 6221, and a Turnkey solution from a company called Carillion. Don't be expecting to run Quake and MS Office on this box either, it will probably break the audio hardware functionality. You can run it with any G4/AGP/OSX Mac though (although that's not all you'll need, on either platform).
Audacity has come a looong way in the last year -- I believe they're finally supporting professional-grade digital audio and not just CD-quality (not that I can tell the difference, or anything...).
Music sales don't depend on variable costs. If record 'A' costs less than record 'B', there is no modification in the wholesale pricing of record 'A'.
The distribution companies will charge what the average teenager is willing to spend per album, whether it be via electronic distribution or otherwise. Remember when CDs first came out, and the music industry said 'the price will drop as these things get less expensive to make'? Last I checked the discs were less than a quarter each, and the price per unit keeps rising.
For another model, please see Starbucks Coffee. Wholesale coffee bean prices dropped last year to a 20-year low (less than half of what it had been per pound the year before), and not a single store dropped the price of their coffee-based drinks a penny. They have found out that people will pay their prices because they don't think anything else is possible, so what incentive do they have to change?
The answer is stop supporting companies who behave without ethical considerations, who keep their accounting methods so secret that not even the musicians can get an clear picture of where their money is going, who scream 'foul' every time somebody wants to even attempt to question their pricing models, etc. If a musician sells 5 million albums, and are still unable to clear a penny, there is something fundamentally wrong.
Oh a side note: just because recording software is relatively inexpensive doesn't mean that a wave of incredible music will sweep forth from every spare bedroom and cottage in the land. Skill at songwriting and musicianship are still not available at the Apple Store, or through Sweetwater. OTOH, we still seem to have Ms. Spears and her ilk being hurled at us from every radio station in the country, so who knows? Perhaps we're just numb, and can't recognize good music when we hear it any longer.