Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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)
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
" ...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
...still cost as much or more than they ever did.
Cheap audio production is just *slowing* the increase, not a source of cost reduction.
"$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?
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.
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)
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!!!"