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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...
... 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.
Shouldn't a quote at least be true to be good? Instances abound where people choose quality over convenience. If they didn't then there would be no option to by a quality burger. It would be "eat McDoubles or starve". Furthermore, the "professional" music business is full of incompetent hacks (as well as truly great musicians) and that is also true in the domain that he describes and implies is of lower quality. By his own admission you can get better quality of sound now with very inexpensive tools than you could get paying $1000.00 per hour in the 1970s. Yet, they made awesome music in the 70s. The difference is that in 1970 you only heard the music of a few, whereas now both high quality and lower quality music can proliferate with relative abandon. All you have to do is watch American Idiot to see that you can take a hack and add all the promotion and expensive tools in the world, and they are still a hack. Likewise, Stevie Ray Vaughn would blow your mind with a practice amp.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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.
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.
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...."
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.
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.
What you're missing is that the mainstream has never been about seeking out aesthetic quality. The driving force has always been to market things they know how to market. Weird shit can spend its time in the indie leagues, and we can pick it up later.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Of course we have - go listen to a classical concert and you see a lot of good, well trained musicians.
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!")
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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!
There has never been a better time to make one's vocation music for the very reasons you have suggested
To wit, click through to the end of this video (the video is pretty good too - it's one thing to cover a song, but it's completely another to make it yours). Nataly Dawn initially asked for $20K of donations for studio time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6Z7xceSLy4
Pomplamoose (Jack Conte and Nataly Dawn) being interviewed on the BIRN about how to make a living and other things.
Part one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fa3-SA9SvZ0
Part two: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6a2jQ5zY94
Part three: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKLf3Bjn3v0
--
BMO
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
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.
On top of that, the music of the 70's has been filtered through 40 years and many songs were thankfully lost along the way. In forty years we'll know for sure what was notable today - right now i may have missed it in a cacophony of many sounds that do not interest me.
Dennis Onstenk
It is not just professional singers who do not need electronic 'tricks' to produce good music. Many churches, schools, colleges etc have excellent choirs, and have done since before the recorded music industry was even thought of. Similarly there are many excellent amateur orchestras, and Northern British collieries had world famous brass bands - whose members were miners.
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.
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"?
For what it's worth, professional musicians often do use autotune. The difference is that they don't rely on it. It's a safety net, in case that sore throat from the past 5 weeks of touring throws off the key line in the chorus. Most of the time, the autotune just sits there doing nothing, because the singers hit the notes perfectly.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
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?
Which is the entire point of autotune. Fix the rare slip. Unfortunately, far too many talentless hacks pushed by record executives because they have "the right look" can only perform with autotune turned up to eleven.
-- Will program for bandwidth
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
Antares didn't release Autotune until 1997, well after Thriller.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autotune
Funny thing, most fellow mid & late 90s grads I know are fine with most 80s music -- everything pales in comparison to the embarrassment of having owned MC Hammer, Vanilla Ice, or Sir Mix-a-lot albums/tapes.
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