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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.
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.
Of course we have - go listen to a classical concert and you see a lot of good, well trained musicians.
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.
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.
Audacity - simple, clunky, terrible interface Audacity - is basically the multitrack recorder we would have FUCKING KILLED FOR in the 1980s. And 1990s.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
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?
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.