I admit his rant in that are kind of went off the rails, but I see what he's trying to say, I think. A lot of these services profit from an artist's music whether the usage of their service is legitimate or not. That's his big beef. They wash their hands of the responsibility, while still making money.
The model is good IF everything works out right. But if one of those things goes wrong it all falls apart. Kickstarter is no gaurantee unless you can drum up support well enough to fund things. I know plenty of guys with great bands and good fanbases who couldn't, simply because they personally can't seem to motivate their fans to give money *before* the album is in the can, for whatever reason. Lack of the right kind of charisma, older fanbase, whatever.
Lost of people have contacts for licensing. The demand - and payout - for licensing is a lot lower than one would hope.
Selling it yourself is great, and does work...but only if you're technical enough to set up and maintain your own webstore. Some musicans are. Others aren't. Then you have to get people to go *there* instead of the very convenient itunes or amazon.
All these things CAN be done, but so far, very few have successfully been able to pull of each step in the game.
That kind of cuts to the heart of Lowery's argument. While I like his blog I think he goes off on a few tangents that undercut his message.
The fact is that under the new model, musicians are now absorbing the brunt of the financial risk while still only reaping a tiny, tiny percentage of the reward. In the old model, they only reaped a tiny eprcentage, most of the time, but someone else shared at least some of the risk.
While the new model may be a lot better at some things - barrier to entry, for example, is much lower - this new artist's utopia that a lot of the "make it in music wooo!" blogs love to go on about simply isn't true. We've traded one form of artist exploitation for another, slightly more insidious one.
Who said anything about large sums? Some of us would just like to be able to pay the bills doing this. You make it sound like all these musicians are asking for Bentleys and caviar. Most of the ones I know just want enough to afford health insurance.
The thing is, here, that a lot of these.1% are the 99.9. They don't give a crap one way or the other about the $15/CD model. Most of them are hoping that "hey, if I sell some music, I'd like to be able to live above the poverty line doing so." They'd like to be able to get more than $.0001 for every spotify play. They'd like to know that if someone buys their album from an online site, they'll get a cut (and not have it just go to some suspicious russian grey-market website or whatever).
It's always been a myth that signed musicians are rolling in the dough. Even guys that have had big hits have had to take day jobs just to make ends meet. And it might be better to *be* a musician now, since you don't need to be picked up by a label to sell your music, it's a lot worse to try and make a *living* as a musician. You look at someone like Clyde Stubblefield, one of the most famous drummers in modern history (as part of James Brown's band), and one of the most-sampled drummers ever, and see that he had to have a benefit concert to bay his medical bills, and you can't help but think "wait, why is THIS guy, of all people, just barely scraping by?"
Of course you can make the argument of "they should find better jobs"...well, great, but then we wouldn't have musicians at all, and who'd want that? You can't really do much with a few megastars and a bunch of weekend warriors. There needs to be a musical middle class for there to be enough music for people to enjoy.
True, you don't need a studio. There are lots of interesting spaces to record in, as Radiohead (among many others) have proven since the early days of recording.
However, most of those interesting spaces are not your average 2-3br suburban ranch home.
You don't need an acoustically perfect space to record. But you also don't want and acoustically awful place to record. You record your vocals in a closet? They're gunna sound like they're recorded in a closet. I recently had to remote record an ensemble in someone's living room (it was the only space they could get in the timeframe) and despite my use of baffles, reflexion filters, tight-pattern mics, etc and then a crapton of post-processing you can still tell it was done in a living room.
*mixing* too...doesn't need to be perfect, but if you want a good mix, you'd better have a pretty frickin controlled space. You can get close in a home, with a decent room, a lot of rockwool and some know-how, but it requires time and effort (and a room you can pretty much dedicate to the purpose).
(And good monitors. And good converters. And good processors. And someone who knows how to use it all).
That's what a lot are trying to do, but it is easier said than done. Most artists still generally need some sort of middleman to get their stuff on iTunes, Amazon, etc - aggregators like Tunecore and Reverbnation exist for this reason. They're nto expensive, but they are on the order of $40-50 a year per submission (album, EP, single, whatever) so that adds up. Services like bandcamp are super-great for cutting out as much as possible - they take only a small fraction of your download costs, but they (currently) lack the straight-to-device integration of an iTunes or an Amazon, and it's a lot harder to promote. Now, imagine you decide to run your own web store, selling direct. Awesome. I've done this. All the profits are mine! But also so are all the server costs. And maintenance time. And technical support.
Veritcally, from start to finish, if you cut out all external entities, then you're responsible for: writing the song performing the song recording mixing the song mastering the song publishing the song promoting the song selling the song
Conceivably do-able for a band. Except for one thing: time. All of these are very time-intensive activities. And some are skill-intensive. If you're lucky enough to have 4 band members who can devote lots of resources to all this, there's STILL no guarantee that any of them will have any talent for anything other than songwriting or performing. Sure, if you're an electronic band, you're probably lucky enough to have at least two IT guys playing keyboards, so you can get your web store running...but are they going to be good at creating ad campaigns? Trying to get radio play or sync licenses? Will they have an ear for mixing or mastering? Tour booking?
That's where it all falls apart. There's a lot involved in going end-to-end and usually bands are pretty resource-starved in at least one area. So you end up paying someone to do it for you, whether that's publishing or promoting or mixing or whatever.
> I'm so sorry you can't afford to eat top ramen in your efficiency apartment anymore
There. Fixed that for you.
Seriously, this idea that musicians were just somehow raking it in the moment they got a record contract just needs to die. I *did* get an indie label contract, long ago, and the first thing that happened was that my band photographer started demanding a cut of our "royalties." I asked her if she had change for a $5 (and then fired her). Most of what the label paid us ended up being eaten by production costs (and we kept those pretty low by doing a lot of the work ourselves). After all was said and done, and we'd sold out a run of a few thousand CDs, we had roughly a couple hundred bucks to split among the band members.
That is WAY more common than "oh, hey, I got a record contract, let's go drink Cristal on my boat with some strippers."
The cost of recording *well* is still reasonably high. Not "booking 2 days at Sarm West" high like it used to be, but even with the cheap DAWs of today, you still need good converters, monitors, acoustic spaces, microphones, etc, and these things still cost a premium. The cost of a Neumann U87 hasn't dropped much in the past 20 years, and while a good digital converter is a lot cheaper than it used to be, you can easily drop a few grand on something like a PrismSound or a Metric Halo.
While comparatively that's not much compared to time at Abbey Road or whatever, if you're an indie band struggling to put gas in the van, you're not going to get very far beyond that "couple of 57's and a cheap soundcard", which...well, you *can* make good recordings that way, but it's a lot harder (especially in some genres) than doing it with the right gear.
And there's still the "time" factor. Yeah, sure, you can plug in a mic, point it at your guitar, and go, but...are you *really* a good engineer? Are you really going to be able to competently mix your album without a lot of learning curve? Master it? Then promote it?
Saying "you can always go live and get paid for concerts" is...well, it's a nice thought, but it's kind of naive. There are a zillion touring bands out there right now all working off that model. Do you, as a consumer, go out every night, drop $8 on cover charge and see a show? Do all your friends? Once a week? Once a month? Do you routinely buy $25 worth of merch? The competition for touring bands is super-high. Even those that gig locally every weekend, year round don't make the bucks, simply because...well, how many times will you want to go see the same band if you're not sleeping with the lead guitarist?
My last tour, which we prepared for assiduously, cut every financial corner we could (no hotel rooms, couchsurfing, minimal haulage, skimping on meals, etc) made, after 10 shows up and down the east coast...$16. And we were the lucky ones. The band we toured with lost their asses because they rented a trailer and did an additional show after we left that required an extra long-haul down the coast.
Margins on touring and performing live are razor, razor thin, unless you're, like, Coldplay. This idea that "oh, every musician is going to just make their money performing live" isn't going to work.
There's some workflow to take into account, too - people may only *need* a "word processor" but if they've spent the past 15 years using Word, then trying to get them to jump to LibreOffice or whatever can take some doing, and there won't be a lot of happy campers. My engineering users may be more than happy leaping over to linux and FOSS, but ask my accounting department to do the same, there'll be a riot.
And for companies that do a lot of internal specialized app development, the incentive to use Windows - because there're a zillion VB/VB.NET programmers out there for hire - is strong. Less so since the web has made a lot of stuff OS agnostic, but I've worked a lot of places maintaining 15-year-old VB codebases in whatever the latest version of VB was at the time because it was still faster and cheaper than paying someone to port it to a new platform (and often the same guy who wrote it was still working there). Hell, last week I saw a guy do a new bugfix deployment of an inventory system written in Delphi 4. It takes a long time for this crap to die.
One thing that a lot of people - including a lot of musicians - don't seem to realize is that loudness to the human ear is not an absolute scale. If you play something "loud" for 5 straight minutes eventually your brain will stop processing it as loud. Without a quiet part for contrast, loud stops being loud.
I've worked with dozens of noise/experimental artists who keep telling me "I want this to sound aggressive!" not realizing that because they didn't put any breaks in the song, by the time you hit minute 3 the listener will have unconsciously and completely tuned out their main intent. You can get away with it in a short song, but it happens pretty fast so without any quiet bits you're basically defeating your purpose.
It's okay in dance music, I suppose, if your point is to be hearing it on a club system and dancing to it - you're not exactly in an environment going for tension-and-release and listening detail. Still, most well-produced dance music has a breakdown section. In trance, it's the long, beatless middle bit, in dubstep and electrohouse it's a short "drop" - it makes everything after it sound punchier.
That's kind of a broad assertion to make. Musicians don't generally demand it. Well, *some* do, I suppose, but a lot just say "hey, master this." Then someone else gets involved - a producer, or exec, or somebody who says "this is going to get played on the radio. It needs to be loud."
Speaking with my semi-professional mastering engineer hat on, that is, proverbially speaking, when the shit hits the fan.
There's a secondary issue, though, that I think is intrinsic to the problem: modern pop music, for better or for worse, is generally short, hit-you-with-the-hook-and-chorus-then-get-out-of-the-way type songs. So people aren't really *writing* stuff with dynamic range. It's easy to blame mastering engineers (who are all, as far as I can tell, anti-loudness-wars if for no reason other than they want to preserve their own hearing) or musicians or producers for asking for it loud but...when your song has no quiet parts to start out with, you're going to have a lack of dynamic range no matter how much or little you limit and compress. In isolation, it's fine - a loud 3:30 song with no breaks can be fun and catchy - but stretch that out to a radio block of 5 songs or an album of 10 and suddenly your ears are melting off the side of your head. You can't preserve dynamic range that isn't there.
Luckily, the lube will be covered by your government-mandated health insurance, unless of course you work for a religious organization that considers lube-assisted sodomy immoral.
In Europe they have socialized lube. You can get basic lube for free or pay for a specialty lube. In France you get a month of paid leave afterwards.
One problem I've come across as a mastering engineer is that a lot of the tracks I get aren't written with any dynamic range to start out with. Compressing it to brick-clip status or leaving it uncompressed and dynamic doesn't change the fact that whoever arranged the song turned everything up to "play all parts loud at the same time for the whole song." And while that's fine for like, a 2:30 punk song, for an 8-minute track? Buh.
a) while the difference between a $150 and $5000 speaker is immediately noticeable, the difference between a $1500 and $5000 is much less so. It's diminishing returns. For some, it's significant (audio engineers, especially). For most people? Not so much. Audiophiles are a weird bunch - some of them are very diligent and smart about it, reading acoustics literature and knowing what's what. Others are just gullible people who want to spend $8000 on a turntable to show it off to their friends.
b) you really need a well-controlled environment to really hear tiny imporvements in most cases. Parsons is definitely right on about that. It's why recording studios hire acoustic engineers when they're building things. Your average home has *terrible* bass management, and between room modes, early reflections, slapback and comb filtering the finer points of a $5000 set of speakers aren't going to amount to much, even if you're sitting in the sweet spot. Of course, it's not terribly difficult to buy or even DIY some pretty respectable acoustic treatment (unless you're willing to put a 4-footx4-foot tuned hemholtz resonator in every corner it won't be perfect, but no matter) but to do it right requires doing things like "covering at least 30% of wall surfaces with 4 inches of rockwool", "putting superchunk traps in every corner" and "building an 8" deep quadratic diffuser for the wall behind your listening position" - all things that are hard to do if you don't have a room purpose-built for the job (because those annoying things like "windows" and "doors" can throw off your perfectly aligned diffusers) - or if you live with someone who is less thrilled with the idea of the living room becoming a perfect acoustic space and not, say, someplace where guests can relax.:)
Often, but...not necessarily. The mastering engineer does generally use final limiting, yes, but the recording engineer can still squash the hell out if with a 2buss compressor, (or compress the individual tracks and takes into oblivion) making it virtually impossible for a mastering engineer to do anything with it.
And, as Parsons points out, sometimes it's just part of the style of the music. In a lot of pop and R&B the vocals are very heavily compressed to get that really close vocalist-inside-your-head sound, even when the rest of the track isn't.
There's a fair amount of pyschoacoustic weirdness involved with the loudness war, too. You can have a high dynamic range that sounds loud because you can have a huge crest factor in a very short window (think a dance tune, with slamming kick drums - sounds loud, but has a high dynamic range because the difference between "kick on" and "kick off" is large). You can have a song that's limited to beyond all recognition that sounds like it has a higher dynamic range because it has a "quiet part" in the middle. A lot has to do with how the brain processes loudness over time.
All that said, I've seen an overall increase in RMS power over the past 10 years in pop music. It hasn't been huge, just a db or maybe two depending on genre, but it's enough to be noticeable. At the same time, I'm seeing better preservation of crest factor and "smarter" limiters that don't make the output so damned fatiguing to listen to.
There're a few things about drawing conclusions from this study that seem a little fuzzy. For one, the sample n was 275 scientists. While they may have represented a good cross-section, I'd imagine if you broadened the scope to worldwide and used a larger sample size, you'd see a significant shift in numbers.
Also, I'd bet that if you broke it down by discipline, you'd find a lot more, say, biologists who would find science and religion incompatible. This study also brought in social scientists, and since religion tends to have an impact on social groups, they would probably find it less incompatible than someone who dealt with evolutionary genetics on a daily basis.
Then there's the issue with the definition of "religion." I've often heard physicists get all "spiritual" about the nature and grandeur of the cosmos, but also redily admit that they do not beleive in a supernatural. I don't have enough information from TFA to know if that sort of response was filtered out.
My opinion? Basically I think sci and religion don't come into contact with each other on a day-to-day basis and one can generally ignore the other for most things, but there comes a point in both areas eventually where the fundamental differences in epistemology are going to come into conflict. Science is rigorously materialist, requiring evidence (or at least hard math) to back up a theory, whereas religion is underlyingly supernatural unverifiable received wisdom. Eventually, no matter how hard you try to compartmentalize, at some point these two will be diametrically opposed. For some scientists in some discplines, that point may occur a lot sooner than for others.
Now you can argue the standard line of "science is the how, religion is the why" but science does like to delve into the whys once it's got the hows sorted out on a particular subject, and most religions will go right ahead and posit some hows as well. Certianly in biology we're seeing evolutionary explanations for moral behavior - and that would fly directly in the face of religion's "whys." And of course most religious traditions have thrown a lot of things at "how", from heliocentrism to why there's thunder and all that.
But back to my point, for most people, even scientists, these two conflicting ways of knowing will be something that they can compartmentalize. There's always an underlying conflict, but not everyone comes to a point where they have to deal with it.
The fundamental premise of this article is a bit flawed. It assumes that.NET was created to write windows applications instead of C++/MFC.
If we look at history here,.NET came along with a pretty clear objective - keep people from switching to Java. In the mid-late 90's there were throngs of Business IT developers who were looking to get their stuff online in the.COM boom. Their main choices were ASP, Java and a bunch of smaller choices like ColdFusion and such. ASP became popular with IT shops, but it quickly became clear that it lacked the framework support of Java, was all top-down, didn't scale especially well, lacked a lot of important features, and was easily spaghetti'ed. And with new programmers coming out of the colleges and tech schools and so forth with backgrounds in Java instead of Pascal or Basic, Microsoft realized that they were going to lose their dev marketshare quick if they didn't somehow get on board the web-focused, OO train, particualrly one that would allow them to integrate their web-dev platform and desktop dev platform (at least in some small, marketable way).
Hence,.NET.
Yeah, it's gotten a little ridiculously large, it had a shaky start (v1.0 was pretty dreadful) and some of the language features were slow in coming (how long was it before we got generics?), but strategically speaking it was a smart move for MS - it kept their very large business development base from abandoning them for a competitor. And that is a HUGE market for them..NET also gave MS room to grow. Adding chunks to the framework like AJAX or LINQ wasn't exactly simple, but it was a lot easier than it would've been if they'd stuck to the old VB model.
It's never really been about whether it's better or worse than MFC or whether Microsoft wants to focus everything on managed code. It's always been about "keeping enterprise developers from abandoning Microsoft for competitors like Java." It's doubtful they'll abandon it entirely, and if they do, it'll be a long slow transition to something else, simply because they've staked a huge and very IT-conservative enterprise market on.NET as a complete end-to-end platform.
Back in the heady.com boom days I was young hotshot working on some high-pressure ecommerce projects (as was the fasion at the time) and my co-workers and I would routinely put in 16 to 18 hour days......And then spend the first few hours of the next 16 to 18-hour day fixing all the stupid mistakes our exhausted brains made during the last 5-7 or so hours of "work."
Last year I had a co-worker who, in order to make sure he beat a deadline, worked for 37 hours straight. My manager made his wife come and take him home, since he was not in any shape to continue working. And his code was unreadable nonsense, so we ended up blowing the deadline by probably a lot more doing bugfixes than if he'd just stopped for a while to get some rest.
There's something to be said for just going home, getting some sleep, and taking a fresh look in the morning.
If anyone can beat the japanese, it's the Icelanders. Hakarl? Svid? I'll eat the "weird" things in the back of my local chinese deli, but I draw the line at icelandic rotted shark meat.
What I could never suss out was whether the actors were really that flat, or whether the appallingly comic-book-ish expository dialogue made them seem that way.
Many sci-fi shows have since proven that you can have subtext without a riddle-talking alien.
Slashdot Mirror
I admit his rant in that are kind of went off the rails, but I see what he's trying to say, I think. A lot of these services profit from an artist's music whether the usage of their service is legitimate or not. That's his big beef. They wash their hands of the responsibility, while still making money.
I'd wager thousands have tried. They just failed.
The model is good IF everything works out right. But if one of those things goes wrong it all falls apart. Kickstarter is no gaurantee unless you can drum up support well enough to fund things. I know plenty of guys with great bands and good fanbases who couldn't, simply because they personally can't seem to motivate their fans to give money *before* the album is in the can, for whatever reason. Lack of the right kind of charisma, older fanbase, whatever.
Lost of people have contacts for licensing. The demand - and payout - for licensing is a lot lower than one would hope.
Selling it yourself is great, and does work...but only if you're technical enough to set up and maintain your own webstore. Some musicans are. Others aren't. Then you have to get people to go *there* instead of the very convenient itunes or amazon.
All these things CAN be done, but so far, very few have successfully been able to pull of each step in the game.
Yes. Thank you.
That kind of cuts to the heart of Lowery's argument. While I like his blog I think he goes off on a few tangents that undercut his message.
The fact is that under the new model, musicians are now absorbing the brunt of the financial risk while still only reaping a tiny, tiny percentage of the reward. In the old model, they only reaped a tiny eprcentage, most of the time, but someone else shared at least some of the risk.
While the new model may be a lot better at some things - barrier to entry, for example, is much lower - this new artist's utopia that a lot of the "make it in music wooo!" blogs love to go on about simply isn't true. We've traded one form of artist exploitation for another, slightly more insidious one.
Who said anything about large sums? Some of us would just like to be able to pay the bills doing this. You make it sound like all these musicians are asking for Bentleys and caviar. Most of the ones I know just want enough to afford health insurance.
The thing is, here, that a lot of these .1% are the 99.9. They don't give a crap one way or the other about the $15/CD model. Most of them are hoping that "hey, if I sell some music, I'd like to be able to live above the poverty line doing so." They'd like to be able to get more than $.0001 for every spotify play. They'd like to know that if someone buys their album from an online site, they'll get a cut (and not have it just go to some suspicious russian grey-market website or whatever).
It's always been a myth that signed musicians are rolling in the dough. Even guys that have had big hits have had to take day jobs just to make ends meet. And it might be better to *be* a musician now, since you don't need to be picked up by a label to sell your music, it's a lot worse to try and make a *living* as a musician. You look at someone like Clyde Stubblefield, one of the most famous drummers in modern history (as part of James Brown's band), and one of the most-sampled drummers ever, and see that he had to have a benefit concert to bay his medical bills, and you can't help but think "wait, why is THIS guy, of all people, just barely scraping by?"
Of course you can make the argument of "they should find better jobs"...well, great, but then we wouldn't have musicians at all, and who'd want that? You can't really do much with a few megastars and a bunch of weekend warriors. There needs to be a musical middle class for there to be enough music for people to enjoy.
True, you don't need a studio. There are lots of interesting spaces to record in, as Radiohead (among many others) have proven since the early days of recording.
However, most of those interesting spaces are not your average 2-3br suburban ranch home.
You don't need an acoustically perfect space to record. But you also don't want and acoustically awful place to record. You record your vocals in a closet? They're gunna sound like they're recorded in a closet. I recently had to remote record an ensemble in someone's living room (it was the only space they could get in the timeframe) and despite my use of baffles, reflexion filters, tight-pattern mics, etc and then a crapton of post-processing you can still tell it was done in a living room.
*mixing* too...doesn't need to be perfect, but if you want a good mix, you'd better have a pretty frickin controlled space. You can get close in a home, with a decent room, a lot of rockwool and some know-how, but it requires time and effort (and a room you can pretty much dedicate to the purpose).
(And good monitors. And good converters. And good processors. And someone who knows how to use it all).
That's what a lot are trying to do, but it is easier said than done. Most artists still generally need some sort of middleman to get their stuff on iTunes, Amazon, etc - aggregators like Tunecore and Reverbnation exist for this reason. They're nto expensive, but they are on the order of $40-50 a year per submission (album, EP, single, whatever) so that adds up. Services like bandcamp are super-great for cutting out as much as possible - they take only a small fraction of your download costs, but they (currently) lack the straight-to-device integration of an iTunes or an Amazon, and it's a lot harder to promote. Now, imagine you decide to run your own web store, selling direct. Awesome. I've done this. All the profits are mine! But also so are all the server costs. And maintenance time. And technical support.
Veritcally, from start to finish, if you cut out all external entities, then you're responsible for:
writing the song
performing the song
recording
mixing the song
mastering the song
publishing the song
promoting the song
selling the song
Conceivably do-able for a band. Except for one thing: time. All of these are very time-intensive activities. And some are skill-intensive. If you're lucky enough to have 4 band members who can devote lots of resources to all this, there's STILL no guarantee that any of them will have any talent for anything other than songwriting or performing. Sure, if you're an electronic band, you're probably lucky enough to have at least two IT guys playing keyboards, so you can get your web store running...but are they going to be good at creating ad campaigns? Trying to get radio play or sync licenses? Will they have an ear for mixing or mastering? Tour booking?
That's where it all falls apart. There's a lot involved in going end-to-end and usually bands are pretty resource-starved in at least one area. So you end up paying someone to do it for you, whether that's publishing or promoting or mixing or whatever.
> I'm so sorry you can't afford to eat top ramen in your efficiency apartment anymore
There. Fixed that for you.
Seriously, this idea that musicians were just somehow raking it in the moment they got a record contract just needs to die. I *did* get an indie label contract, long ago, and the first thing that happened was that my band photographer started demanding a cut of our "royalties." I asked her if she had change for a $5 (and then fired her). Most of what the label paid us ended up being eaten by production costs (and we kept those pretty low by doing a lot of the work ourselves). After all was said and done, and we'd sold out a run of a few thousand CDs, we had roughly a couple hundred bucks to split among the band members.
That is WAY more common than "oh, hey, I got a record contract, let's go drink Cristal on my boat with some strippers."
Cost of recordings has gone down, yes.
The cost of recording *well* is still reasonably high. Not "booking 2 days at Sarm West" high like it used to be, but even with the cheap DAWs of today, you still need good converters, monitors, acoustic spaces, microphones, etc, and these things still cost a premium. The cost of a Neumann U87 hasn't dropped much in the past 20 years, and while a good digital converter is a lot cheaper than it used to be, you can easily drop a few grand on something like a PrismSound or a Metric Halo.
While comparatively that's not much compared to time at Abbey Road or whatever, if you're an indie band struggling to put gas in the van, you're not going to get very far beyond that "couple of 57's and a cheap soundcard", which...well, you *can* make good recordings that way, but it's a lot harder (especially in some genres) than doing it with the right gear.
And there's still the "time" factor. Yeah, sure, you can plug in a mic, point it at your guitar, and go, but...are you *really* a good engineer? Are you really going to be able to competently mix your album without a lot of learning curve? Master it? Then promote it?
Saying "you can always go live and get paid for concerts" is...well, it's a nice thought, but it's kind of naive. There are a zillion touring bands out there right now all working off that model. Do you, as a consumer, go out every night, drop $8 on cover charge and see a show? Do all your friends? Once a week? Once a month? Do you routinely buy $25 worth of merch? The competition for touring bands is super-high. Even those that gig locally every weekend, year round don't make the bucks, simply because...well, how many times will you want to go see the same band if you're not sleeping with the lead guitarist?
My last tour, which we prepared for assiduously, cut every financial corner we could (no hotel rooms, couchsurfing, minimal haulage, skimping on meals, etc) made, after 10 shows up and down the east coast...$16. And we were the lucky ones. The band we toured with lost their asses because they rented a trailer and did an additional show after we left that required an extra long-haul down the coast.
Margins on touring and performing live are razor, razor thin, unless you're, like, Coldplay. This idea that "oh, every musician is going to just make their money performing live" isn't going to work.
There's some workflow to take into account, too - people may only *need* a "word processor" but if they've spent the past 15 years using Word, then trying to get them to jump to LibreOffice or whatever can take some doing, and there won't be a lot of happy campers. My engineering users may be more than happy leaping over to linux and FOSS, but ask my accounting department to do the same, there'll be a riot.
And for companies that do a lot of internal specialized app development, the incentive to use Windows - because there're a zillion VB/VB.NET programmers out there for hire - is strong. Less so since the web has made a lot of stuff OS agnostic, but I've worked a lot of places maintaining 15-year-old VB codebases in whatever the latest version of VB was at the time because it was still faster and cheaper than paying someone to port it to a new platform (and often the same guy who wrote it was still working there). Hell, last week I saw a guy do a new bugfix deployment of an inventory system written in Delphi 4. It takes a long time for this crap to die.
Much like Daniel Tosh.
One thing that a lot of people - including a lot of musicians - don't seem to realize is that loudness to the human ear is not an absolute scale. If you play something "loud" for 5 straight minutes eventually your brain will stop processing it as loud. Without a quiet part for contrast, loud stops being loud.
I've worked with dozens of noise/experimental artists who keep telling me "I want this to sound aggressive!" not realizing that because they didn't put any breaks in the song, by the time you hit minute 3 the listener will have unconsciously and completely tuned out their main intent. You can get away with it in a short song, but it happens pretty fast so without any quiet bits you're basically defeating your purpose.
It's okay in dance music, I suppose, if your point is to be hearing it on a club system and dancing to it - you're not exactly in an environment going for tension-and-release and listening detail. Still, most well-produced dance music has a breakdown section. In trance, it's the long, beatless middle bit, in dubstep and electrohouse it's a short "drop" - it makes everything after it sound punchier.
That's kind of a broad assertion to make. Musicians don't generally demand it. Well, *some* do, I suppose, but a lot just say "hey, master this." Then someone else gets involved - a producer, or exec, or somebody who says "this is going to get played on the radio. It needs to be loud."
Speaking with my semi-professional mastering engineer hat on, that is, proverbially speaking, when the shit hits the fan.
There's a secondary issue, though, that I think is intrinsic to the problem: modern pop music, for better or for worse, is generally short, hit-you-with-the-hook-and-chorus-then-get-out-of-the-way type songs. So people aren't really *writing* stuff with dynamic range. It's easy to blame mastering engineers (who are all, as far as I can tell, anti-loudness-wars if for no reason other than they want to preserve their own hearing) or musicians or producers for asking for it loud but...when your song has no quiet parts to start out with, you're going to have a lack of dynamic range no matter how much or little you limit and compress. In isolation, it's fine - a loud 3:30 song with no breaks can be fun and catchy - but stretch that out to a radio block of 5 songs or an album of 10 and suddenly your ears are melting off the side of your head. You can't preserve dynamic range that isn't there.
Luckily, the lube will be covered by your government-mandated health insurance, unless of course you work for a religious organization that considers lube-assisted sodomy immoral.
In Europe they have socialized lube. You can get basic lube for free or pay for a specialty lube. In France you get a month of paid leave afterwards.
You'll be in for a bigger shock when your cat chews through your $120 headphone cables.
Trust me.
One problem I've come across as a mastering engineer is that a lot of the tracks I get aren't written with any dynamic range to start out with. Compressing it to brick-clip status or leaving it uncompressed and dynamic doesn't change the fact that whoever arranged the song turned everything up to "play all parts loud at the same time for the whole song." And while that's fine for like, a 2:30 punk song, for an 8-minute track? Buh.
Yeah. You *can*, but...
a) while the difference between a $150 and $5000 speaker is immediately noticeable, the difference between a $1500 and $5000 is much less so. It's diminishing returns. For some, it's significant (audio engineers, especially). For most people? Not so much. Audiophiles are a weird bunch - some of them are very diligent and smart about it, reading acoustics literature and knowing what's what. Others are just gullible people who want to spend $8000 on a turntable to show it off to their friends.
b) you really need a well-controlled environment to really hear tiny imporvements in most cases. Parsons is definitely right on about that. It's why recording studios hire acoustic engineers when they're building things. Your average home has *terrible* bass management, and between room modes, early reflections, slapback and comb filtering the finer points of a $5000 set of speakers aren't going to amount to much, even if you're sitting in the sweet spot. Of course, it's not terribly difficult to buy or even DIY some pretty respectable acoustic treatment (unless you're willing to put a 4-footx4-foot tuned hemholtz resonator in every corner it won't be perfect, but no matter) but to do it right requires doing things like "covering at least 30% of wall surfaces with 4 inches of rockwool", "putting superchunk traps in every corner" and "building an 8" deep quadratic diffuser for the wall behind your listening position" - all things that are hard to do if you don't have a room purpose-built for the job (because those annoying things like "windows" and "doors" can throw off your perfectly aligned diffusers) - or if you live with someone who is less thrilled with the idea of the living room becoming a perfect acoustic space and not, say, someplace where guests can relax. :)
Often, but...not necessarily. The mastering engineer does generally use final limiting, yes, but the recording engineer can still squash the hell out if with a 2buss compressor, (or compress the individual tracks and takes into oblivion) making it virtually impossible for a mastering engineer to do anything with it.
And, as Parsons points out, sometimes it's just part of the style of the music. In a lot of pop and R&B the vocals are very heavily compressed to get that really close vocalist-inside-your-head sound, even when the rest of the track isn't.
There's a fair amount of pyschoacoustic weirdness involved with the loudness war, too. You can have a high dynamic range that sounds loud because you can have a huge crest factor in a very short window (think a dance tune, with slamming kick drums - sounds loud, but has a high dynamic range because the difference between "kick on" and "kick off" is large). You can have a song that's limited to beyond all recognition that sounds like it has a higher dynamic range because it has a "quiet part" in the middle. A lot has to do with how the brain processes loudness over time.
All that said, I've seen an overall increase in RMS power over the past 10 years in pop music. It hasn't been huge, just a db or maybe two depending on genre, but it's enough to be noticeable. At the same time, I'm seeing better preservation of crest factor and "smarter" limiters that don't make the output so damned fatiguing to listen to.
There're a few things about drawing conclusions from this study that seem a little fuzzy. For one, the sample n was 275 scientists. While they may have represented a good cross-section, I'd imagine if you broadened the scope to worldwide and used a larger sample size, you'd see a significant shift in numbers.
Also, I'd bet that if you broke it down by discipline, you'd find a lot more, say, biologists who would find science and religion incompatible. This study also brought in social scientists, and since religion tends to have an impact on social groups, they would probably find it less incompatible than someone who dealt with evolutionary genetics on a daily basis.
Then there's the issue with the definition of "religion." I've often heard physicists get all "spiritual" about the nature and grandeur of the cosmos, but also redily admit that they do not beleive in a supernatural. I don't have enough information from TFA to know if that sort of response was filtered out.
My opinion? Basically I think sci and religion don't come into contact with each other on a day-to-day basis and one can generally ignore the other for most things, but there comes a point in both areas eventually where the fundamental differences in epistemology are going to come into conflict. Science is rigorously materialist, requiring evidence (or at least hard math) to back up a theory, whereas religion is underlyingly supernatural unverifiable received wisdom. Eventually, no matter how hard you try to compartmentalize, at some point these two will be diametrically opposed. For some scientists in some discplines, that point may occur a lot sooner than for others.
Now you can argue the standard line of "science is the how, religion is the why" but science does like to delve into the whys once it's got the hows sorted out on a particular subject, and most religions will go right ahead and posit some hows as well. Certianly in biology we're seeing evolutionary explanations for moral behavior - and that would fly directly in the face of religion's "whys." And of course most religious traditions have thrown a lot of things at "how", from heliocentrism to why there's thunder and all that.
But back to my point, for most people, even scientists, these two conflicting ways of knowing will be something that they can compartmentalize. There's always an underlying conflict, but not everyone comes to a point where they have to deal with it.
Whatabbout Fender, Ibanez, Schechter and all the others? They're not getting raided either.
I'm not a huge fan of Gibson. Anyone who ever relied on Opcode Vision or OMF has a beef with their biz practices.
The fundamental premise of this article is a bit flawed. It assumes that .NET was created to write windows applications instead of C++/MFC.
If we look at history here, .NET came along with a pretty clear objective - keep people from switching to Java. In the mid-late 90's there were throngs of Business IT developers who were looking to get their stuff online in the .COM boom. Their main choices were ASP, Java and a bunch of smaller choices like ColdFusion and such. ASP became popular with IT shops, but it quickly became clear that it lacked the framework support of Java, was all top-down, didn't scale especially well, lacked a lot of important features, and was easily spaghetti'ed. And with new programmers coming out of the colleges and tech schools and so forth with backgrounds in Java instead of Pascal or Basic, Microsoft realized that they were going to lose their dev marketshare quick if they didn't somehow get on board the web-focused, OO train, particualrly one that would allow them to integrate their web-dev platform and desktop dev platform (at least in some small, marketable way).
Hence, .NET.
Yeah, it's gotten a little ridiculously large, it had a shaky start (v1.0 was pretty dreadful) and some of the language features were slow in coming (how long was it before we got generics?), but strategically speaking it was a smart move for MS - it kept their very large business development base from abandoning them for a competitor. And that is a HUGE market for them. .NET also gave MS room to grow. Adding chunks to the framework like AJAX or LINQ wasn't exactly simple, but it was a lot easier than it would've been if they'd stuck to the old VB model.
It's never really been about whether it's better or worse than MFC or whether Microsoft wants to focus everything on managed code. It's always been about "keeping enterprise developers from abandoning Microsoft for competitors like Java." It's doubtful they'll abandon it entirely, and if they do, it'll be a long slow transition to something else, simply because they've staked a huge and very IT-conservative enterprise market on .NET as a complete end-to-end platform.
Back in the heady .com boom days I was young hotshot working on some high-pressure ecommerce projects (as was the fasion at the time) and my co-workers and I would routinely put in 16 to 18 hour days... ...And then spend the first few hours of the next 16 to 18-hour day fixing all the stupid mistakes our exhausted brains made during the last 5-7 or so hours of "work."
Last year I had a co-worker who, in order to make sure he beat a deadline, worked for 37 hours straight. My manager made his wife come and take him home, since he was not in any shape to continue working. And his code was unreadable nonsense, so we ended up blowing the deadline by probably a lot more doing bugfixes than if he'd just stopped for a while to get some rest.
There's something to be said for just going home, getting some sleep, and taking a fresh look in the morning.
If anyone can beat the japanese, it's the Icelanders. Hakarl? Svid? I'll eat the "weird" things in the back of my local chinese deli, but I draw the line at icelandic rotted shark meat.
Hee hee hee.
Prepare for the flames!
Katsulas was a pretty decent actor.
What I could never suss out was whether the actors were really that flat, or whether the appallingly comic-book-ish expository dialogue made them seem that way.
Many sci-fi shows have since proven that you can have subtext without a riddle-talking alien.
Many pro audio recordings are made at 96 or 192khz. Played back at 44.1, but originally recorded at 96. Usually at bit depths higher than 16.