Slashdot Mirror
How Amateurs Destroyed the Professional Music Business
David Gerard writes "Here in the future, musicians and record companies complain they can't make a living any more. The problem isn't piracy — it's competition. There is too much music and too many musicians, and the amateurs are often good enough for the public. This is healthy for culture, not so much for aesthetics, and terrible for musicians. There are bands who would have trouble playing a police siren in tune, who download a cracked copy of Cubase — you know how much musicians pirate their software, VSTs and sample packs, right? — and tap in every note. There are people like me who do this. A two-hundred-quid laptop with LMMS and I suddenly have better studio equipment than I could have hired for $100/hour thirty years ago. You can do better with a proper engineer in a proper studio, but you don’t have to. And whenever quality competes with convenience, convenience wins every time. You can protest that your music is a finely-prepared steak cooked by sheer genius, and be quite correct in this, and you have trouble paying for your kitchen, your restaurant, your cow."
People prefer a $1 McDouble over a $15 premium burger. The public chose VHS over Betamax. "Good enough" is good enough.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
They have given us terrible artists for years, maybe they will finally go away...
whenever quality competes with convenience, convenience wins every time
And I shall steal it shamelessly .
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
... one might note that the mainstream industry has very little appeal to people that are intellectual or at least deeply interested in the actual content of their music.
The mainstream studios that are cracking out 'hit' after 'hit' (aka: highly advertised until people like it) are producing basic melodies in C Major with 'artists' that cannot honestly perform well on stage and likely can't do their music well in a true LIVE setting.
The mainstream studios are facing REAL ARTISTS and losing. What should they expect? They think they can churn out half-assed simpleton music and not be out-competed by bedroom producers with less than 5 years experience? Please... Mainstream music is awfully easy to make. 2 or 3 basic chords. Very little elaboration or demonstration of musical mastery. Major key. Generalized/Simplified/Non-confrontational/obvious/regurgitated lyrics. Chorus-Verse-Chorus-Verse-Chorus. Except you call the 'chorus' a "HOOK" now because it's usually very simple and has a catchy jingle.
Yeah. Lame.
Full disclosure: I've been a bedroom producer for 18 years now. I have a successful conscious hip hop crew and produce more complex and better music than most mainstream labels - check my sig. My emcees are more skilled than most of the latest studio-emcess, and they have great stage presence, and we have actual artistic/intelligent lyrics that have value beyond simple entertainment. I've been making music since before it was easy. MS-DOS was the OS when I started.
You can protest that your music is a finely-prepared steak cooked by sheer genius, and be quite correct in this, and you have trouble paying for your kitchen, your restaurant, your cow."
Sacred cows make the best hamburgers.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
You reap what you sow...and what the record companies sowed were generations of unsophisticated listeners that don't know the difference between the popular artists and their next door neighbor and his robot. Musicianship, composition, pshaw. Drum machines and stored samples.
I don't care at all, there's plenty of vibrant and new alternative music -- that being jazz and classical and what's out in the World. Just look.
Put another way, we have musicians who don't have a clue on how to play a musical instrument at all! Trouble is, they are still famous - for their voice I guess.
Left to its own devices the music industry will revert to the lowest common denominator in search of profit, with no-talent acts like Kate Perry, Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift receiving the most production and marketing investments. Perhaps it's time for a more egalitarian approach to mainstream music, where talent rise to the top instead of the performer with the biggest boobs or prettiest face.
A professional singer (you said musician, so I'm assuming singer since you are specifying voice) does not get their voice fed through some fancy equipment in the sense it's going to distort the whole signal into something it's not supposed to be. IE autotune or melodyne. That's why they call them professional singers - they are trained enough so that all they need is probably some compression an reverb - and that's it.
Yes, Amateur singers who one would assume are professional since they are in a major recording studio use the 'fancy equipment' , because they can't sing, voice sucks, have pitch problems, or other reasons.
However the article is citing music writing only I believe, not singing.
Its middle management that has always "Destroyed"(sic) the music business, at a casual glance at the charts, irrespective of your personal favourite decade and personal music snobbery. We have been selling groups on looks over talent since forever. This has not changed. I find it kind of insulting that the article lumps both musician and record companies together. With the record companies weakened it puts talent on equal par with whatever twerking child karaoke star of this week, and that is a good thing if they "work". There is no shortage of good live talent...the answer is always go see them, and can be pretty cheap, and will make for a better memory.
Thanks.
Stick Men
Professional musicians with record contracts use auto-tune tools all the time, so why can't amateur musicians have access to the same tools? I have no sympathy for the recorded music industry, they have been crooked since day one and reaped plenty of profits off the hard work of underpaid performers and songwriters. Live performance is even changing as performers can have their vocals corrected "on the fly" instead of trying to lip sync as marginally talented musicians did in the past. So the recorded music industry will go the way of the travel agency, which is just economic reality. The record industry was created to get music recorded and out to the people, and they are no longer needed. People will still find music they like, and performers will find ways to make money in local clubs until they build up a larger audience. Quality of the musical performance is not a requirement...look at The Sex Pistols or The Ramones. Interesting that as some industries (retail, banking) become more and more concentrated in the hands of fewer companies (Walmart, JP Morgan Chase) the music business is becoming more eclectic and wide open. Sure, the media companies have consolidated, but any kid with a PC and an internet connection can get his/her music to the world. Seems like progress to me.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
Being unable to make a living at something is the free market's way of telling you to find something else to do. Horse dung sweepers used to be a necessary job in cities before automobiles, now not so much. They either became machine street sweeper operators, or found a new job. If the same happens to mediocre musicians, so be it. The very good ones will still find work.
I notice that new artists like Lady Gaga have adopted the popular "freemium" business model. She has given away literally billions of views of her music videos, and collects the ad revenue that YouTube pays, but it's free to the audience. Then she sells a limited commodity - seats at live shows - at a premium. I do that too, give away basic content, charge for premium service.
Terrible for musicians? Comparatively? There has never been a better time to make one's vocation music for the very reasons you have suggested (albeit it is as hard as it has ever been to get "big"). In the olden days many moons ago musicians (often) suffered in poverty until they caught a record deal - now they can develop from their bathroom, garage, (etc) and connect their music to any audience that is willing to listen to their music (or garbage).
Well there's your problem. Stop calling your chef a cow.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
. . . they have destroyed The Bieber.
Then the amateurs can roll out the "Mission Accomplished" banner on their aircraft carrier.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
After reading through this gentleman's site, I think the post over here on /. should be renamed "Guy on internet who complains a lot complains about one more thing." Seriously, with gems like "I’m quite glad that radios in the workplace have largely been replaced by headphones." and subject's like "Talk to your children about their shitty taste in music." merely posting this over here is troll feeding. If we were to replace the summary as well I would do it with the classic "Old man yells at cloud" image.
Art makes a great hobby - zillions of people play music, write short stories, act in amateur theater groups, whatever. This is wonderful for culture. Frankly I often prefer a heartfelt amateur performance to an overly-polished professional group going through the motions of the same damn thing for the thousandth time.
My heart does not bleed for professional artists. Most of them need to get a real job to support their hobby, the same as the rest of us...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
This whole article is a troll/flamebait/clueless.
I guess you wouldn't like Bathory then, which is a shame.
Some of those high end daw software are extremely expensive. most "serious" amateurs either get a licence or get a cheaper daw like reaper. The whole article is a dud.
same thing is happening with photography, websites building, graphic design, and so on...
Famous last words:"but...."
Also I would like to see any 200$ laptop with asio. anyone know any?
You might think that, but I mentioned the problem in the article for live musicians: in the '80s they were competing with boring television, now they're competing with an Internet full of ATTENTION GRABBING EVERYTHING. I wrote that bit from talking to musicians who can't even get decent pay for gigs any more and are wondering what the fuck happened.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
For most of history, musicians were nobodies, ranking below, say, bartenders. For a brief period in history, from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, being a musician was a Big Deal. That's over. At peak, there were over 8 million bands on Myspace. Some of which didn't suck.
On top of that, music became automated. Between synthesizers and AutoTune, who needs musicianship? All those years of practice, and your job can be done by a box that costs a few hundred dollars.
There's very little worth doing that you can't do with the older cracked version. ... so I hear.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
The reason the music industry is in any kind of trouble is because of how the companies that control this industry are not, in effect, effectively growing the industry, mostly because of incompetence, not being artists themselves.
There are not enough artists in society.
Artists are the ones who dream the dreams that become tomorrows reality. Art is what lifts up your day and get you out of your troubles, etc.
When art degrades so does society.
The companies that run this industry are like vampires making money on artist's creations. (Part of it are our own fault since there is this popular consideration that if you are an artist you should suffer as that gives you more to "draw" from. Also nonsense, but so true to most of us that most makes sure they suffer. As a result they think that cannot properly and effectively handle themselves and that they let these companies control their output.)
The same companies are not only incompetent in many things, but helping artists grow strong is not on their agenda. Strong artists are a threat to them, rightly so given their criminal level of exchange.
If you wonder why any art form is suffering don't even think it's because of too much competition as that will never lead to a solution. Now if you don't want a solution then you should promote this idea that there is too much competition.
BTW, "just good enough", comes from the same companies. They are the ones releasing it.
As a note, which is known to established musicians, the only way to make money is to tour since the labels keep 90% of the profits.
the problem is that older musicians signed all their money away to a record label in an age where distributing by yourself is free. because of this, those musicians are losing out to the musicians offering their songs for a dollar on itunes, because the record labels charge 15$ per album. eventually musicians will get with the times and realize they should just cut out the middle man.
99% of music produced at any given time doesn't live to see the next decade or century. In the end the masters remain and their works become classics. There's been thousands of troubadours and composers, who never produced anything else than huge mass of light background music or cheap copies of the current major hits. All but few forgotten...
Because of the horizontalization (democratization?) of the field and the mass availability of music I'd argue that skills become increasingly appreciated. The open view to what everybody else is doing also acts as a catalyst of self improvement. Invention of computer graphics has not killed the field of visual artists and producers either.
What really skews the perceived reality of what's good and what's not is the marketing. Majority of population will always go with the easiest solution anyway. It's somewhat futile to wish that all of a sudden everybody becomes a connoisseur, because the genetics and biology can't be changed.
There's a documentary (free to download actually :)) which explores the subject: PressPausePlay
Bravely bold Sir Robin
Rode forth from Camelot.
He was not afraid to die,
Oh brave Sir Robin.
He was not at all afraid
To be killed in nasty ways.
Brave, brave, brave, brave Sir Robin.
He was not in the least bit scared
To be mashed into a pulp.
Or to have his eyes gouged out,
And his elbows broken.
To have his kneecaps split
And his body burned away,
And his limbs all hacked and mangled
Brave Sir Robin.
His head smashed in
And his heart cut out
And his liver removed
And his bowls unplugged
And his nostrils raped
And his bottom burnt off
And his pen--
"That's... that's enough music for now lads,
*** there's dirty work afoot*** ???."
Brave Sir Robin ran away.
("No!")
Bravely ran away away.
("I didn't!")
When danger reared it's ugly head,
He bravely turned his tail and fled.
("no!")
Yes, brave Sir Robin turned about
("I didn't!")
And gallantly he chickened out.
****Bravely**** taking ("I never did!") to his feet,
He beat a very brave retreat.
("all lies!")
Bravest of the braaaave, Sir Robin!
("I never!")
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
professional musicians are usually no better...
No, professional musicians are almost always better. Unfortunately, they're rarely attractive enough to get record contracts. If you want to find professional musicians, look in symphonies, operas and musicals. Those guys can play/sing anything. Hell...look in the background of all those "talent" reality shows...they guys in the back playing the instruments for the talentless amateur that the judges fawn over are professional.
The music industry started its decline when they chose to promote attractive "artists" over talented artists. The advancement of technology in enabling amateurs is only the latest inevitable step in that decline.
A beautiful and raw original idea kicks the ass of a flawlessly executed banality.
Who cares if the music industry deflates? The "Rock Stars" are a study in decadence and greed and the "Music Industry" is a study in ruthlessness and greed.
Cubase, ProTools, Ableton . . .. The kids of today are going to lead us away from "computer music" into very new territory. Just imagine what Mozart could create if he had a decent music workstation!
The music industry (as it has been) would have us listening to stuff that was fresh forty years ago.
Sooner or later the kids are going to learn how to market themselves, just like they're mastering the new music creation tools.
I'll give up production values for originality any day.
And whenever quality competes with convenience, convenience wins every time.
That's true in photography as well and, perhaps to a lesser extent, video. There is a certain quality that is "good enough" for human perception.
I can listen to MP3s from nearly ten years ago and they sound just fine to me. I can still use the same loops I was using in 2004 and they still work in songs today in the same mixing software.
The very reason amateurs can catch up to a big studio technologically is that there isn't as much obsolescence in audio. And why variations of the iPhone occupy the top three slots of the most popular cameras on Flickr.
It will be interesting to see if the video industry can push 4K. 2K and HD look just great projected on the big screen and 4K seems like the first upgrade for the sake of upgrading.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Garage Band on an iPad (or even an iPhone) is as good as $100/hr trip at the local recording studio. Heck, it's better than what you could get even 20 years ago, back when the only real home recording option was multitrack cassette tape. Technology improved enough in the 90's to allow home computers to do good multitrack recordings, and suddenly everything changed. Nowadays, you can whip up a quick demo on your iPhone without the need of any musical instruments, and it would be just as good as that $500 demo tape you had produced in the 1980's. A 10 year old can do it in no time at all and without any help. It's really amazing!
Well, in the early days, my band paid off two home mortgages by giving away terrible quality mp3's and asking for 10 bucks for a high quality CD - and we got lots of sales. Yes, we were good live and in our (homebuilt) analog, then digital studio. We had a decent following, and got an offer from Warners. Being engineers, a couple of us read the contract - no frigging way we'd sign that stupid thing. We had product *already* but they wanted to "front" us millions to remake it in their overpriced studios, cut a deal where we got a tiny fraction of any profit after all costs (mostly imaginary) by them were paid and so forth. While she's otherwise "out there" Courtney Love's rant on this is dead on - hollywood accounting isn't worth being on the wrong side of. My own book sold over 50k copies and they haven't paid me a dime yet - I know because it came with code, and my email was in the code. The book co claimed I sold negative numbers some months!
The internet is the most deflationary creation of all time. Back in the day, if you wanted music, you made your own, or watched one of the rare "artistes" touring your little settler town. Or you lived in one of the bigger cities in a pile of manure on the streets.
The record company model only lasted as long as artificial scarcity could be created. With the fact that it's now easier to be good at music (better gear, some stuff helps you "cheat"), and that now there's little if any scarcity - they lose, just like buggy whip/carriage makers. Good riddance, they were cheating all the actual workers all along, as Frank Zappa correctly stated.
Go see your local bands, and buy their CD's out of the back of the car if you like them. Better model, we'll get better music as a result anyway.
Did you know that if I want to hear say, the Berlin Philharmonic play say from 1950 or so - it's illegal? Not in print - but still in copyright. Making a copy, if I find one, is against the law, but I can't find anyone to pay to make it legal either. So those assholes have stolen our musical heritage for all time. Don't support them.
Except for a recent few decades, musicians have always struggled to make a living for precisely this reason. This "millionaire musician" has been a historical outlier, a quirk of physical media bottlenecks and copyright law. Music was not scaleable until the victrola came along, and then it became a business where 99% of the wealth was in the hands of 1% of the musicians, and now the pendulum is swinging back towards normal.
Gently reply
I used to be a music journalist, so "Old man yells at cloud" describes my life pretty accurately.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
What means "amateurs'?
My wife is a professor of music (finished music academy), who always loved making some quick songs and inventing random quick themes. But she never really had time for this.
She enrolled into audio engineering class a month ago, found out about (and learned a bit of) Ableton Live and realized that technology has made so many (repetitive) tasks/things easier, she went completely crazy and started creating music at incredible rate that I could have never imagined before. I am a hardcore geek (or I still like to think that way), but I can't follow what she does anymore, and it's been only a month. Whole new complex world.
Basically, get a MIDI controller, Scarlett 2i2 interface + mic, and software will make anything possible.
If a busy mother of 2 young kids (although, with very heavy music theory/harmony background), who was exposed to Ableton Live only a month ago, can manage to get things done at this rate, I can not even imagine what the 'proper' studio should be able to do.
However, it appears that real professionals are not the ones making the professional music, but much time is wasted trying to make mediocre people sound like professionals. That's why so much modern 'professional' music is simply shit (long live 80s ;). Probably the same way so much time is spent trying to make politicians look honest ;)
So, the question is - is she (an educated musician) really an "amateur" just because she doesn't need/want a studio in order to make some music? Do you really need to spend $200,000 on 'professional' studio, so that you can at the end have your music converted to a shitty MP3 format?
Shameless plug (now that I've talked so much about her music): https://soundcloud.com/bronux
ASIO4ALL
Yes, this is a bad time for the (what we think of as "traditional") music business, but just because the tools are "available" doesn't mean that there will be a huge increase in output. e.g. people have had the tools to write for years (pencils, paper, typewriters, word processors) - but professional authors and publishers aren't going away ...
even if you are a hack writer- it still takes "work"to produce a non-trivial product. That "work" part is my argument for why the scenario described won't happen ...
I'll even argue that the biggest change to happen to the music industry was the microphone and/or radio back in the first half of the 20th century not inexpensive computers and the internet. Back then "music companies" made money selling sheet music - which people would purchase to play at home. (I recommend this fantastic Coursera class to anyone interested in the history of modern music business) ...
I agree that the music industry is changing - but "convenience wins every time" is a spurious argument. Most of the "professional" musicians I've heard talk about "how they got into the music business" describe it as something they just had to do. They didn't just wake up one morning and say "I think I'll be a musician" - they followed their passion, put in the work, and eventually made it. That isn't going to change - "passion will beat convenience" no matter what technology comes along ...
It ain't what they call you. It's what you answer to. http://mylyceum.us/
Says it best: http://i.imgur.com/nN3ZO1L.gif
SFW
- Seriously... RIAA, MPAA, recording "industry", Media Syndicates, Mass Media, Murdoch, Hollywood, Dionysian Cultists.
You cannot stop nature. You cannot control humanity. You cannot enslave us. If you do, we'll just make slave songs and share them for free amoungst ourselves.
Music is not a form of property meant to be "legaleezed" into submission for a tiny power elite.
In fact nothing is. So go die in a fire.
When the modern recorded music industry (lets not talk classical masters here, whole different ball of wax) started, was it not tinkerers that came up with the technology? was it not amateurs and garage bands that were the pioneers? Then it all turned into an elitist closed "good ol boys" money club. Now the power is coming back to the people. New, easier technology is letting a new generation of tinkerers and amateurs give it a shot. Sure you will get sucky "artists" but they don't last long. Heck even i tried a bit with some software acquired through "unconventional means" but i am not creative enough and the results were... not good at best. Eventually the good ones rise to the top and get known. And as far as the damned purist hipsters "only notes made on a guitar made of willow bark, whale bones and alpaca sinews chewed by a secret tribe in the Andes are worth of the name music". Bite me. Culture changes, people's tastes change. Just because YOUR brand of ultra obscure neo-punk-trip-hop-nerd core jazz is not popular with the masses doesn't mean pop (as in popular with a lot of people (but i still Bieber is a talentless hack, my opinion only)) music is crap. It just means people prefer something else these days and tomorrow it will be something else. Such is life. Get over it.
It's not obvious that a large number of musicians having a very small slice of the pie is worse than a very small number of musicians having a large slice of the pie.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
So true! So insightful.
Between the internet and a couple video games, I can drop 10 hours a day of entertainment time without blinking an eye.
Have to focus to get to the gym and play boardgames/roleplaying games with my friends.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
When given a choice, people choose what they like. 'Quality' in what people find entertaining or pleasurable is entirely subjective. The music 'industry' has been based on restricting choice and pushing products on largely captive markets. The world has changed.
Not sure why you're voted down. It's the truth. The industry favors performers over musicians. That's how they can have famous people who can't sing well and don't write their own music. All they do is follow choreography and look sexy.
...oh wait, no, it's my ears. The amount of 'professional' music I own amounts to less than a fifth of the 'amateur' stuff, and that gap is just widening.
:D
I find there to be much more diversity and heart and effort in the amateur groups, an acceptance of the chance to fail when trying something unconventional or niche. Songs that aren't just about the love of their life and their breakup, or thankfulness for having them. Sure a lot 'suck', but that's often a matter of taste, and there are some great gems out there to find. I'm happy that technology has allowed them to self-polish and be able to be found more readily. In particular the multitude of conventions for self-published releases unleash a wealth of new music regularly.
As for the poor suffering Record Industry, isn't there a lesson from biology here? Something about a lack of diversity and having specific requirements making a group vulnerable to a catastrophic collapse?
I haven't posted here in years, partly because I've been too focused on my music career.
First off (-topic), fuck Cubase, Ableton is waaaay better and just as easily pirated. And while on the subject of piracy, musicians spend more money on music (shows, instruments, hardware, etc) than anyone else, all while actively giving back to the music community by producing art; if they pirate music software, I say good as long as they can't afford it, because it at least allows them to create their art, which is good for everybody. I haven't paid for my copy of Ableton yet, but I definitely plan on it once I can.
Now regarding primary points of the article. Say what you want, but making beautiful expressive music is extremely difficult in a digital environment. Sure you can correct your mistakes, layer a dozen parts by yourself, and accomplish musical feats with the press of a button that, e.g., concert pianists might spend their whole life practicing to achieve, but none of that has to do with the artistic side of music. What the author really means is that humans no longer have to spend years practicing fine muscle coordination to be able to create complex music, but that doesn't free the musician of the burden of turning sound into art with real expression behind it.
This is why a lot of electronic music sounds stale and repetitive. If you don't know, there exist "construction kits" which allow me to create, e.g., an above average trap song in about an hour (including mastering). A lot of people do this, but a lot fewer go--or even know to go---to the trouble of creating real expressive content so that the music is not only aurally pleasing and cerebrally interesting, but also emotionally evocative. Evocativeness used to be a given in music, but these days it has to be sought out. That said, all the best producers reliably achieve it, even in the digital space, which can add challenges since expression is fundamentally an analog creature.
What's true is there's a lot more noise around the signal. This can make it a lot harder for good musicians to succeed, but most of the doom-and-gloom perspective comes from the masses of shitty musicians who've entered the market now that the barriers to entry are lowered: Talent still rises to the top, but all these n00bs who create digitally perfect tracks that sound like music are whining en mass that no one listens to their songs and that it must the system's fault because their tracks sound good. People don't listen to music because it "sounds good", they listen to it because it's art, i.e. it has content and is moving. Everything else is just icing on the cake, but who wants to eat just icing all the time.
I don't need to be a rock star to be a satisfied musician. That said, if you don't believe there exist rock stars and legends these days, clearly you've never been to a Bassnectar concert or are otherwise not paying attention.
In case you're interested:
https://soundcloud.com/mdmtmusic
https://soundcloud.com/mdmt-development
https://www.facebook.com/MDMTmusic
And if you're in the Denver area, we're playing at Cervantes on Sept 29th.
"old man yells at cloud"?
man this is Slashdot...the proper meme is "old man yells to get off his lawn"
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
only because you love it.
Pros who aren't super-famous *restored* the "music industry" for me, assuming that what you mean is "got me to pay for music". On more occasions than I can count, I have visited coffee shops or the San Gregorio General Store and flipped some money into the tip jar.
Prior to that, I just didn't pay for stuff because radio was good enough, or I had Yahoo music subscription and they ruined it. So yeah, RIAA got ruined by pros who aren't famous, but these guys get money directly from me without going through you and I help to support interesting local music. In other words, so long RIAA. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
How condescending.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I'd rather drop $10 in an online tip jar of a band in Japan or Kenya than give it to some parasitical US music studio that will take the lion's share of the money for itself and use it to pursue a piracy jihad against its users if its profits don't make their numbers for the quarter. Sure a lot of those garage bands are complete crap, but at least they're doing it for the love of music. And even if their delivery is imperfect, sometimes their artistic vision more than makes up for their musical talents. So go ahead and kill the "professional music business." I'm sure we'll all have fun dancing on its grave, to music it would never have been able to imagine.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
There was PLENTY of dreck in the 70s. And a lot of us paid good money for it..
Not just lousy B sides on singles, but albums with 12 songs, 1 great, 1 decent, and 10 that you listen to because you're too stoned to get up and put another record on the turntable.
And production quality was erratic. MCA had some good artists, but the hiss in the quiet spaces? Clearly they were not disciples of St. Dolby, may he rest in peace.
And finally, there were incredibly popular songs that fortunately have disappeared for all practical purposes: Afternoon Delight was a huge top 40, maybe top 10 hit. How many of you are listening to those old songs on Best of Bread?
What about "Don't go breaking my heart"? Elton John is a good musician, but that's not exactly a song that will be on a "all time 100 hits" list. It was number TWO, after "Silly Love Songs", another song that's ok, but #1 in 1976?
>> There is too much music and too many musicians,
Yeah and most of its crap not worth listening to, especially the commercial stuff.
What there is a shortage of is GOOD music.
There are bands who would have trouble playing a police siren in tune, who download a cracked copy of Cubase ... and tap in every note.
Guess what? That's still music. I say this as a musician who can carry a tune. Don't be such a fucking snob.
David Gerard writes
"Here in the future, musicians and record companies complain they can't make a living any more. The problem isn't piracy — it's competition. There is too much music and too many musicians, and the amateurs are often good enough for the public. This is healthy for culture, not so much for aesthetics, and terrible for musicians.
This means art becomes entirely a folk enterprise: the sound of the culture talking amongst itself. This is lovely in its way, but all a bit fucked if you aspire to higher quality in your subcultural group.
The market is not perfectly efficient.
The problem then is not genius works, but finding, and making, them in your chosen aesthetic vocabulary
really, i was gonna say "cry me a river" and move on but, after a closer look ... this is not a hoax, right? what a continued display of retardeness!!! such idiotic people actually do exist and they write on the internets. is that news?
- Hey, anyone can make computer programs at home. All programers will starve
- Anyone can make movies at home, movie makers
- Anyone can make theater plays are home. The Royal Shakespearean Company actors will starve
- Anyone can make coffee at home. Starbucks will go broke
- Anyone can invent a god at home (Ron Hubbard proved it). All religions will run out of money
Cry... me... a... river....
morcego
For the most part the professionals are not that great. A significant percentage of people are good musicians, and there is really no reason for most if not all professional musicians to be worth millions of dollars.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I have no doubt this is true, but my experience is that for the "electronic" music genre (won't split hairs about sub-genres here, but I'm using the term to include all sorts of material out there that's primarily created on the computer using synthesizers and samplers plus a potentially highly-processed vocal track), this was *always* the case.
I used to play rhythm guitar in a band back in the early 90's ('91 - '93 time frame) and we knew guys doing "Industrial music" at the time who didn't even think it was necessary to have "songs", in the sense of pieces of music performed the same way every time. To them, it was all about being one big "performance" where they hit "play" on their gear to play back whatever backing track they created earlier for the show, and overlaid all sorts of sounds or tweaks to sounds by playing around with sliders and controllers while everything played live. As long as the audience could dance to it and liked what they heard, it seemed to work for them. But the whole thing bothered me from a musician's standpoint. I mean, if you aren't even practicing your material to create segments you can play back basically the same way multiple times, upon request -- aren't you conveniently skipping over a standard prerequisite of being a musician?
I think of these guys (like Deadmau5) as blurring the lines between musician and DJ, really. And that's ok as long as everyone's honest about what's going on. But I wouldn't say what they do is indicative of a decline in music on the whole. The digital tools available today open up these new possibilities to perform in new ways, but sometimes at the expense of using skill-sets traditionally considered "part and parcel" of being a musician.
this summary and the whole thread make absolutely no sense to me.
Definitely true that the technological hurdles for recording music have been coming down. For $100, I can buy a high-quality interface for plugging my guitar into my ipad. For $200, a condensed microphone. And garageband costs $15, and it's free on new phones and ipads. I can see how all of this really hurts the music industry, from the technical side - all the recording techs, fancy recording studios, especially those that catered to the mid-tier pay-for-it-yourself crowd. I'm sure they're getting pinched.
Also, more competition broadens the market. There will be fewer multi-millionaire recording artists, but I bet the total amount spent on music (including live shows, etc) will only grow because the supply is growing. This trickles up to the record labels as well - sorry capital records!
But he're is what I don't get - the idea that the quality of music will go down. You know, the amount of music that's really good. I think this can only go up! The music industry has always had this shadow of really talented people who didn't make the cut for the big boys. Now they all have a voice, and there will be many more diamonds that rise to the top.
In short, the music recording industry may be taking a hit, but the music culture is going through a renaissance.
Based on the number of notes that it has been seen to take to count as copying, there are only a few million distinct songs. This means there'd be no need for a specific "homemade music prohibition act". When the major music publishers want to attack an indie artist, they could just try to dig up existing copyrighted songs that sound like the artist's songs. George Harrison, for example, lost a lawsuit for having subconsciously plagiarized a Chiffons song on his solo debut album (Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music). The only reason you haven't seen music plagiarism lawsuits more often, given the prevalence of plagiarism in popular music, is that disputes among major labels are often settled with a cross-license, something not as easily available to indies.
Competition is no where near the problem, and here is why.
If all these indy acts were actually competing with say, established acts that the industry passes for pop music these days, the music would sound the same. Competition is what makes Pepsi and Coke very similar, what makes Auto advertisements look all alike, as with one year skid pads are in most of the commercials, the next year its wind driven muslin flying off the vehicles, and so on. Competition makes most competing items look, act, sound, or taste the same.
As far as I know, the only people who sound like say, Beyonce are other acts promoted by the industry, or maybe on some of the performance competition TV shows where people are trying to get into the pop music field.
Sorry, but the Popular music industry is only getting what it worked long and hard to achieve. They are trying to blame it on file sharing, this lame competition excuse, while overlooking that they are putting out a monumentally worthless product. If they were to put out music that doesn't suck, they might sell more.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
- Hey, anyone can make computer programs at home. All programers will starve
That's exactly why consoles have lockout chips. In 1983 when anyone and everyone was making Atari 2600 games, they were flooding store shelves, and no one was buying for fear of getting burned by dropping what amounts to $60 (after inflation) on boring, unbalanced gameplay. Nintendo had to erect an entry barrier in order to reassure North American toy stores that its NES would avoid the same fate.
No, it will separate out one category of skill from another. Performance and composition are both skills. Not everyone is good at both of them. The world would be a dreary place without the performers who can't compose having music written for them, and the composers who can't perform finding people (or machines) to play their music.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Or, if you don't wanna pirate stuff, get Reaper: http://www.cockos.com/reaper/
Cheap ($225 if you're making more than $20k, $60 for personal or small-scale commercial use), excellent quality, friendly upgrading. The sum total of the "copy protection" is that if you aren't registered, it will remind you that they are asking money for it. It does not restrict or limit itself in any way. Extremely flexible and powerful.
The world has changed, and overall I think it's for the better.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
most musicians traveled and got paid by passing the hat. Then came the record companies that turned musicianship (or at least marketing of music) into a multibillion dollar business, including big bucks for a few megapopular artists that they hyped and pushed on radio stations.
My question is this- why should musicians (or athletes, etc.) make millions of dollars for making music? Why don't the engineers who designed the iPhone (no, it wasn't Jobs who designed it) make millions? All the fuss over pirating music is because the record companies can't figure out how to keep their cash-cow mooing. They've been screwing most musicians for years. Now they are getting screwed and they don't like it. I find it hard to feel any sympathy for them. And to musicians who have trouble earning a living I say this: don't quit your day job.
Budweiser makes the best beer ...
Which Budweiser, made in the USA or Czech Republic? :-)
You're correct. The old business model the recording industry used for decades is already dead; it's just still twitching. It'll be gone by the wayside in another 10 years. Talentless so called "artists" who rely on Autotune and studio wizardry will not survive. Instead the ones with real ability will, and their main revenue will be from live performances.
The quality of the recording is only a technical aspect of the recorded work. The musicality (how good or enjoyable the music is) has a far bigger bearing on the quality of the listener's experience. We all want good music first, and clear sound second. Without the former, the latter doesn't please, but the converse is not true.
People can tell the difference between the $1 burger and the $15 burger. Can that person tell the difference between the $5 burger, $10 burger and $15 burger, and is the improvement in taste/texture worth the cost increase? I will bet that most people cannot tell the difference between the $5 burger and the $15 burger.
That is the issue the music industry is facing: while a lot of people can tell the $1 burger from everything else they cannot tell the difference between the $5 burger and the $15 burger. Because of that they are not willing to pay the difference for something they do not appreciate.
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
As a pilot and a scuba diver who would be ecstatic to make 6-7 figures doing what I love. The reality is that people work for nothing to get to do both of those things for free and in the case of helicopter ratings actually PAY to work until they can get enough experience to warrant a very low salary.
While I sympathize with those poor out of work music execs/musicians. They pretty much can go eat a bag of dicks if they think they need special protection to keep their unrealistic business plan afloat.
Labor has been losing ground to capital for a while now and the trend is only getting stronger. In the not so distant future it's not difficult to imagine an economy where the labor that most people have to offer is essentially worthless compared to what can be produced by robotic factories and automated assembly directed by only the very best humans who will be paid quite well indeed for their labor. If we haven't figured out something for the rest of society to do by then then things could become very interesting in a dystopian sort of way.
Professional music stars are, in many cases, poor musicians. While some could be masters in any genre of music, others would never be good enough even for a cheap nightclub act, without all their affiliated hype and promotion. I really appreciate hearing a good quality musician. If the musician is an amateur, so much the better.
Antares didn't release Autotune until 1997, well after Thriller.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autotune
as with any art form - whether it is pottery, drawing, or music - there will be those who do it for fun, and those who do it for the money. Those who do it for fun by themselves are sure to gain greater respect from there peers then those who do it for profit and pay someone to do the hard work for them.
That - and the fact that the artists are seeing competition from many other sources today than they did a few decades ago.
Leisure time over the decades:
60's - Drinking beer and listening to The Beatles.
70's - Drinking beer and listening to Grateful Dead.
80's - Drinking beer and listening to Michael Jackson.
90's - Drinking Jolt Cola and Playing computer games.
00's - Smoking weed and surfing the web.
10's - Smoking weed and watching cat videos on YouTube or Teens on Redtube.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Always remember, no matter what business you are in, your business model DOES NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO EXIST.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Actually, a lot of pop music today is the *same* as the pop music of 30 years ago, because the studios just have today's current boy/girl-toy act cover the same song that was originally written 40 years ago and re-produced every decade since. Do you think the average 12-year old the music industry is targeting knows that fact?
Music is an art of creative self-expression. If more people get to express themselves creatively, that is for the better, even if the performance art aspect diminishes. Learning an instrument properly is a self-discipline, and it is good to see examples of what can be done with proper practice, but how important it is that people can dedicate their lives to mastering a single instrument is another question: self-discipline is a tool to aid daily life, not a replacement for it. The death of industrialised performance art where music is a tool for making money should rightly be welcomed.
John_Chalisque
Out of interest : what band would that be?
The possible solution for music labels is to invest/buy venues as as an 'industry' - for example, Universal, Sony, EMI etc, must pool in their financial resources to encourage culture of live music. I would say that the labels will have to be extremely patient until they are able to capitalize/profit from such a venture - but it does have good scope. The concerts can be free and break-even can be achieved by innovative branding. I have worked as a music journalist in India, and I recall a very interesting quote which Trilok Gurtu (a world-renowned percussionist) told me - "Music has become a side-dish" - this comes from a guy who "performs" on a regular basis - hundreds and thousands of concerts - and is definitely not into downloading loops and punching in notes. If guys like him feel the mindless dilution, there is something indeed serious, but Gurtu is not out of job - he is a world-class musician, and people need to be introduced to virtuoso musicians and genuine talent. They will begin to recognize the difference between amateurs and professionals eventually - what is needed is - perceptions have to be reshaped.
There is no blurring. As someone who has been in the scene for awhile, and also as someone who has done audio for EDM festivals, underground raves, and everything in between, let me shed some light on how it really breaks down.
Producers: A misnomer to some, but they are the people that produce music. Producers also DJ and do Live PAs to promote their music when they go do live shows.
Live PAs: This is what Deadmau5, Chemical Brothers (Live Sets, not DJ sets) and Daft Punk (though not really live) does. Basically you have all the parts of all the songs you've done and you just do a whole jam session live, constructing all the music on the fly. If done right, this is just beautiful. But Deadmau5 is an asshole and generally just blows live. Here, have a video of an old friend of mine doing a set El hypno
DJs: This is what everyone knows. Mixing some tracks together to make music.
Coming real soon: AI-based authorware. Anyone will be able to become an author, generating many "good enough" books every day. Contrived and derivative plots. Who cares? As long as they please hoi polloi, who needs professional authors?
"Mainstream music is awfully easy to make. 2 or 3 basic chords."
Most music is 2 or 3 basic chords. Why? Because that's what most people can remember in their heads. They want something that they whistle or hum at work. This is the extent of people's involvement with music. How many can hum an entire Beethoven/Chopin symphony/sonata? With the advent of karaoke, it became even more important for mainstream music to keep it simple stupid. The pop music of yesteryears, folk music, is almost entirely basic chords, major or minor depending on the song's mood.
I've never had any movies which took up two Beta tapes, and we used to have a whole collection (also VHS).
...of which Bathory was a part of.
That the technology has improved to the point where just about anyone can produce their own music. Some will be good, some will be bad. Just like the music industry today, some good stuff, some really bad stuff.
You're being a geek and treating music as if it were a science. Its not. As somebody enlightened once said : "people listen to music for emotional quality not sound quality".
Why else are do people still hunt down and listen to scratchy old 78's and get massively excited about them? Or go to live gigs in small venues full of noisy drunk people?
Stop getting hung up on the tech and go out to live gigs more and remember how it feels to get excited about the music itself!
What is quality to you is not necessarily quality to someone else.
The idea that an amateur poking out a song on their laptop is somehow inferior to one mixed by a "professional" is totally up to each individual. And in fact, if more people are choosing said amateurs, then it is likely that said "professionals" are not really worth their pay grade.
Laying the blame on convenience is just an excuse. It's also much more "convenient" for me to download someone's MS paint sketch, but I don't see professional oil artists complaining that the internet is destroying their livelihood.
And finally - a few key quotes from the past (sourced from http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/10/100-years-of-big-content-fearing-technologyin-its-own-words/ )
The huge surge in very intelligent digital cameras that produce color images has lowered the technical barriers that used to separate professional photographers from amateurs - the guy-with-a-camera.
With film, amateurs were mainly limited to B&W shooting and processing because the development of color film is relatively difficult. Now, with digital cameras, anyone with a few hundred dollars and a functional shutter finger can produce technically fine images that rival film professionals' efforts.
So there are thousands of times more people producing good-to-great images and selling them for peanuts, utterly destroying the business model for low and middle rank photographers.
Many pros have turned to teaching workshops and make much more money from that than actually selling pictures.
Your are confusing retail mark up with the recording industry. Record stores take half... AFTER the record companies sell to them. I am talking about BEFORE record companies distribute to the stores. Yes, record companies take more than half, right off the top.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
If a band were to be so bad as to not make a single note in tune, but so good with pro-tools they could make themselves sound professional, then they may be a terrible band but if they are THAT good at pro-tools they are as good as anybody in the business and would make excellent studio console jockies.
This is like arguing that photoshop is destroying professional photography when terrible photographers can simply 'fix' it in photoshop. We know that not to be true. Likewise no amateurs making youtube videos in Vegas is serious competition to hollywoods dollars.
Yes there is a lot more music out there but that is simply a side effect of having the tools to create music become much more accessible. Instead of a music company A&R man deciding what people want to hear, people actually decide directly. If they like an artist they listen to and hopefully buy from that artist. If they don't like an artist they turn a blind eye. The unfortunate bit for the music industry is often times the bad music that is being ignored is their professionally produced shovelware crap.
I would also like to point out that the main determinator as to an artists pay scale is not the quality of their music, it is their fame and it has always been so. Remember the Funk brothers making all of those great Motown songs, shaping an entire decade of american musical culture, yet a lot of them could barely hang on as studio musicians and that was back in the 'golden days' before home recording.
Yet if you get fame and manage your finances you can make tons of money with little to no talent. You need look no further than any of the 'solo' artists who don't write their songs, don't play an instrument, don't even decide what the music will be about, and couldn't sing it without autotune. Hell, Milli Vanilli proved back in the 90's that to become famous and make money and win awards you didn't have to sing at all, just lip sync and look like a model.
So while there are many problems as the ancient music industry adopts to modern innovations in home recording and the ability of artists to speak directly to their fan base and sell their albums directly to their fans without the music industry middlemen, better access for aspiring musicians to be able to make professional sounding music in their bedroom, is not one of those problems.
"..giving away terrible quality mp3's and asking for 10 bucks for a high quality CD.."
That's sure how it works for me. Scrounge the crappy MP3s, start frothing at the mouth about the ones I really like, buy a CD as an upgrade and as a reliable backup medium. I just bought a DVD from one band that's thereby addicted me (and they throw a lot of their stuff up on Youtube, and even link to uploads by other folks). I bought all three of one band's CDs on the basis of the dozen or so MP3s they gave away.
It was the same before MP3s. When I DJ'd, I could copy any album I wanted for the cost of a cassette tape. The result? I *bought* more music during that period than ever before or since.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I've been thinking about this for awhile, and really, if most people are listening to the majority of their music through crappy earbuds, it becomes much less important for content providers to use million dollar equipment that can catch the delicate vibrato of the singer's nose hairs, when the end user is only going to catch 60% of the lyrics anyway.
Add the tendency to compress compress COMPRESS in the studio, and it comes down to using megabuck equipment filtered through trendy white but acoustically inferior buds to create music the quality of a ringtone, and (switch to frank zappa voice) You might be thinking "*I* could do that". And of course, you can. (/zappa)
And "here" is not necessarily a bad place. Yes, there's more content out there to choose from. (How is this a bad thing?) Performers who are *not* or no longer represented by mega-record-companies are getting the whole of a much smaller pie, and that's not necessarily a bad thing either.
Not everyone will have heard of Squall Above Little Doll Flipper, but they keep 100% of the proceeds for their very obscure CDs and downloads, and that might be enough to get by.
This is not a bad thing, really. But color me not surprised that the industry is trying to blame their lessening ear-deathgrip on bands illegally downloading audio production software.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
While there's a lot of this going on, the stuff that gets radio play in most genres is still heavily biased to the studio system. At the very least, a professional mastering engineer gets involved. It's not uniform, but most rock, pop, jazz, country and classical is recorded in a studio and not some dude's basement. (yet).
The primary exception is dance music.
----
"I used to listen to Null Device before they sold out."
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
That music is brought back to the people. The fact you don't need a label and $250K to make an album is a GOOD thing for humanity. While yeah, it sucks for the labels, but y'know what, too fucking bad. The mainstream music industry has been producing nothing but shit for more than 20 years. They only have themselves to blame for their losses. Their little house of cards is finally falling, and music is finally starting to return to where it belongs.
He wasnt complaining so much about the quality of modern audio technology as the economics. Artist cant make money off of selling music if its all free on the net. Jaron is both a famous computer scientist and musician.
The entire post is nonsense. Historically, the vast majority of the world's great artists, in every art, have been professionals. Look at Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Michaelangelo, Leonardo, and so forth. These people were paid for their art (although they sometimes had trouble making ends meet), and invested considerable portions of their lives and their selves in doing their art. That's what it means to be a professional in art. They were not dabblers, toying with art because of a social perception that doing so is somehow cool or worthy.
Getting good at ANY art requires an enormous investment of time, and of energy, and perhaps a portion of one's soul. This simply isn't practical for most people.
Only a tiny few of the composers that are found in the history books were amateurs, and these were invariably wealthy dilettantes. In other situations, we find great works done by some priests, who were financially supported by their religion, which in turn freed up the time to do art at a high level. But ordinary people, with a day job, working for a living? They simply don't have the time or motivation to become great at art unless they're getting paid for it.
It's impossible for amateurs to destroy professional art. Make no mistake: if there are people taking money away from the legacy music industry, it is because these so-called-amateurs are themselves professionals that have been mislabelled by people that don't understand how art really works.
The professional music business existed long before the recording industry made recordings of "popular" music widely available. Once such recording became available, it became fashionable to have heard the recorded artistes despite the fact that you could hear the same music, without the loss of quality inherent in the recording and probably performed by better singers and musicians at your local music hall or tavern. Once people started to direct their disposable income towards the recording companies instead of the local performers, the professional music business was brought to its knees. The recent availability of "amateur" performances is merely serving to restore the balance by showing that the artistes being foisted upon the public by the recording companies are very ordinary performers with no special talent and not deserving of an elevated share of the money pot. Moreover, although the poor quality of the early recordings is consigned to history, it is increasingly common to hear the strange tonal warbling that is introduced when a digital sound recording system is used to correct the poor vocal quality of the singer(s). So let us hope that the trend towards listening to amateur and live performances will continue until the blight that is the recording industry has been eradicated forever.
Maybe the high priced snobs at the top of the supply curve need to pay better attention to what the market is trying to say.
Namely that the public is either too poor to afford their high class stuff, or doesn't consider it worth the price, or both.
Either way, you're charging too much.
Audacity has been free for a while and Logic Pro X is only AUD$200. There is no need to download anything cracked. Logic Pro 9 was over AUD$1000 when I bought it. The software is the least of the problems. I think for AUD$200 most musicians can afford to purchase professional software, else there is Audacity, which is free. Though not as good as Logic Pro, still produces tracks good enough for a release. It was what one of my vocalists on the other side of Australia used to record her track for my latest album. I then copied her vocal tracks into my song and voila, off to get it professionally mastered for release.
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)
and what makes a pro a pro then when it comes to music ?
the skill ? or the record label ?
lets just ban unsigned artists in the name of the children then ?
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
If its true that people always go for the cheap, how did a 50 cent cup of coffee become a $3-6 DAILY purchase? Or water which last time I checked flowed freely from all faucets is purchased in bottles for a buck and in the case of Fuji double that...water pretty much tastes the same, mmmmmm.... Are the musicians missing something? Have you been to a RECORD store lately? People are plopping down some serious bucks for stuff we couldn't give away a few years ago. Just thinkin' it's easy to bitch. It's harder to actually do something about it. I've been a full time Musial for almost 40 years, trends come and go but cream still rises.
had you actually tried it out and tasted the cardboard box, you would have noticed, that - as disgusting as it may taste - it's still the best tasting and best quality part of what you get when you pay for a burger at McDonald's.
I mean, if you aren't even practicing your material to create segments you can play back basically the same way multiple times, upon request -- aren't you conveniently skipping over a standard prerequisite of being a musician?
Actually sounds a fair bit like jazz or blues improv to me.
Not making a funny - you get a bunch of jazz musicians together, and you'll get about what you describe - the bare minimum of chord structure and a whole lot of people doing their own thing. (I've heard a song opened by "OK, twelve-bar blues in A - two three four").
Ban guitars, drums, and keyboards for anyone without a professional music license, with harsh penalties for possession and usage.
round up all instrument dealers, go after the king-pins of the manufacturing and importing industry, lock 'em up and throw away the key.
and execute school music teachers for corrupting the children.
must. protect. industry. profits!
Apart from professional musicians?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Well you've hit the nail on the head Soulskill. There is a knee jerk, populist reactionary trend towards blaming corporate publishers for the sorry state of American music. I reject this, however, at least in part. It is of use to realise that corporate controls and guidelines were once fashioned to actually nurture the best traits of the musicians they employed. Three album deals with proctored sessions and world class mastering were just a given with more on the back end if the musicians showed growth. But then, you go back to the 1980's and beyond and you actually had to have unusual talent to be a professional white collar musician. This is because, culturally, we expected more. We appreciated the effort and craftmanship it took to make an album's worth of pallatable sounds. The "indy" scene is the worst modern offender, even worse than hip hop in my little opinion. Just file after file of droll pounding away on single lines with entirely too much FX saturation to disguise how mundane the technique is, how utterly limp their grasp of theory. But I also have hope, too. Remember, it was from similar mundane, cookie cutter stock that complex forms of rock music were born. That 50's do-wop, greaser rock that all used the same damn blues chord progression lasted a long time, but it paved the way for more interesting acts like the Beatles, who's signature sound became the signature sound of a generation and itself birthed heavy metal, punk, prog rock, jazz influences in rock, later on funk. Music is organic that way. From humble bacterial roots can evolve a sound that can stand upright. Give it time and educate any who will listen. Encourage them to explore what theory has to offer. Open their minds to the vast array of sounds from human past and do what you can to knock some of that infantile "irony" out of them. In some ways, it's more important what you do with your heart and mind than what you do with your hands, hence Bob Dylans and Kurt Cobains. This snide culture of self obsessed irony is toxic on many levels and pollutes everything it touches. Slap a pair of thick rimmed glasses off a moron today! And while you wait for the next creative well-spring to break free, don't forget that just under the surface is a world where good music does still exist. It's not in the mainstream, and maybe that's a good thing. Marcus Miller. Victor Wooten. Les Claypool. (Obviously I'm a bassist) Good music isn't gone, it's just not as readily accessible as it once was, and until this tide of hip selfishness has discovered how tragic it really is, I think it's a good thing to keep these world separate.
See, I have to take issue with your apparent assumption that what's being produced locally by the home musician is any different from the dreck being produced in Hollywood studios. One both sides of this line you see a clear collapse of theory and virtuosity. It's nothing but two vapid kingdoms fighting over who can be the most self indulgent. From both sides a gem rarely emerges, but both sides suffer not from the excesses of their technology but the lack of character and self respect to do better. I would sooner hitch my cart to the home made indy scene than the hollywood vamparism that has for so long defined the mode of business of major publishers. But I would not be quick to come to the defense of home grown music in an age where objective parameters are not showing up on the charts. You can say you like a sound or not. you can like a style or not. But theory is mathematical in nature and one of the only truely objective measures of whether a song is "good" or not. It's incomplete as a metric on its own, but you take what you can get. And the fact remains that most home grown music simply lacks any of the depth, complexity or understanding of even basic harmonics found in "crappy" bands from yesteryear. 90% of all home grown music is some jerk pounding away on an instrument over saturated with effects in a flimsy attempt to give character to mundane lines that are mundane because they lack a foundation in good music theory. It's vanity incarnate, it's selfish and it's profoundly uninteresting. Just like everything on the radio.
if you aren't even practicing your material to create segments you can play back basically the same way multiple times, upon request -- aren't you conveniently skipping over a standard prerequisite of being a musician?
Late reply, but this is improvisation and in essence what jazz musicians do. It's still musicianship, being the blurring of composition and performance. You could argue it is a higher level of musicianship, rather than being a cover band for your own songs. :) Also you can practice improvisation, to better be able to respond to different moods, styles and predict (and therefore better sync with) your bandmates.
Granted, almost all improvisations are based around a pre-arranged chord structure or at least mood, but not all.