Well, yes, marketing hasn't changed all that much. You have to do it, always had to, and you generally use the same tricks. But the actual distribution I would say has changed pretty dramatically in the last 60 years. Snocap, iTunes, CDBaby, Discmakers et. al., selling your own CDs at gigs, home-burnt or not (not many people had cutting lathes for vinyl 50 years ago), sticking CDs into magazines (LPs just didn't work as well for that), physical copies of music in places like Wal-Mart, Barnes & Noble or the corner deli, Starbucks et. al (the custom, in-house label spinoff concept), ringtones. Aaaiieee!! I actually remember when you just went to the record store, maybe the musical instrument store, and bought a record. And that was it, besides Columbia House.
So to me, on the one hand the industry has indeed solidified, calcified even... but on the other hand it seems to be liquefying - the ground keeps shifting beneath everyone's feet, throwing everybody off balance, and everyone's wondering what to do. It's the huge conglomerates who have the toughest time, like a huge steamship trying to turn on a dime to avoid the big glacier. Us guys in the small speedboats can zigzag around and back a lot easier, even though the waters are still treacherous.
So I leave you with one of my favorite quotes about our beloved industry. It pretty much accurately reflects the often brutal and sad process of "natural selection" that is at work. Not pretty, definitely not perfect or what I would like, but it's what we got. (sigh)
"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic
hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs.
There's also a negative side." -- Hunter S. Thompson
For a studio owner? Oh yes, life was (and still is) brutal. Those huge Neve or SSL consoles are a million or more. That, along with the cost of everything else, drove strong men to weep and lose their sanity on a regular basis. Huge nut every month...
I think in a weird way it's way cheaper and just as expensive these days to produce music. The lines are definitely blurring between artist/label, or artist/engineer, labe/distributor, artist/distributor/road manager... it's freaky, it's really cool - just a pain in the ass to sort out and impossible to put in neat little boxes.
The real boon, I think, is that more and more people (including the "5 weird dudes with a tape recorder" - love it!) are able to jump in and try the music-making game. It might be that as more and more people get to achieve fairly good results for very little money, they will begin to recognize that the old-style "big mega-stars" are not in fact, gods, and that what really counts actually is talent and hard work. I'm hopeful that it will induce "professional" musicians, artists and maybe even the "Industry" (ugh) to stop putting out so much garbage.
Ah, such is the glory and mystery of music. Well, that and Britney Spears on the MTV Video Awards. I mean, a little garbage is okay...:^)
Your absolutely right, the costs for those particular things has definitely come way down, thank god.
It's a bit different for a band or singer-songwriter these days. I could do an album right now, for free, with the technology we have today. As long as I have the software. Which could range from free (very poor choice), cracked or stolen (even poorer), a couple of hundred dollars to about $10,000. Oh, and a good mic if I want to actually sing. I should also have a couple of backup drives (200-300 bucks), because if my main hard drive crashes, I have to start over again. And that would mean more time, which actually does equal money. (I am excluding other things like good pre-amps, plug-ins, cost of a computer powerful enough to run the software, etc). Oh, and a couple of hundred dollars if I want to actually put it on a CD and distribute it at my shows, as well as the time that it will take to actually burn all those CDs. Hmm, should probably have some kind of artwork, I suppose.
Or I could use a replication house, like Discmakers. Actually a pretty good deal, 1000 discs for about $1000, artwork, jewel case and labels included.
Maybe I'll just forget CDs altogether and distribute Internet-only. Cool, 99 cents for every song! Minus, of course what CD Baby and iTunes takes from that. But it's still way better thhan what major labels used to screw artists with.
But how do I distinguish myself from the 30,000 other artists out there who did the same thing?
and so on...
The most beautiful and the most frustrating thing about music is that it is by far the most abstract and invisible of all the arts, shrouded in one of the most opaque and cloudy business models ever.
Yes, true, anyone can make anything very cheaply, I try to do that myself all the time!
I also know that it didn't used to cost "hundreds of thousands" necessarily. That was the domain of the over-inflated mega-rockstar budgets. I've worked on many albums that had those kinds of budgets. Most of that money went to food, hotels, airfare, transportation, "handlers", personal chefs, etc., all of a very lavish nature. (Not begrudging them either, I think people should have fun with their money). But it would have been possible even in the 70s to go into a studio with a well-rehearsed band of people that could actually play and sing and crank out ten songs for less than 5000 bucks.
Also: use a cheap ($100) mixer and "a little bit of imagination" is not a guarantee of really great sound. Mic'ing is most definitely a science and an art. I don't for the life of me know how the really good engineers in the world do it. And very cheap mixers have too little dynamic headroom. Not to mention that a really good chamber orchestra costs an awful lot (especially in the US).
But there is quite the spectrum however. And that's what I love about music - it covers the entire range of end users, from the guy in the old Buick playing his music through a little 2-inch speaker to the HD home theater buffs.
And having said all that (gasp), an old adage: If the singer is amazing, it doesn't matter what microphone you use. If the singer is lousy... well.. it doesn't matter what microphone you use.
"Recording costs have declined to almost zero. Artists used to need the labels to bankroll their recordings. Most simply didn't have the $15,000 (minimum) necessary to rent a professional studio and pay an engineer and a producer. For many artists -- maybe even most -- this is no longer the case. Now an album can be made on the same laptop you use to check email."
As much as I used to like the Heads, Mr. Byrne, like most of his ilk, exists in a vacuum. (Not his fault, really)
If one defines "album" as a collection of "sound organizations" (or songs), then the above is certainly true. But he should talk to all the singers, songwriters and musicians out here that want to do "different" things - like have a real string quartet or chamber orchestra, or a really good gospel choir, or record the interplay between a great jazz drummer and an insane guitar shredder, or do an HD video release of the recording session, etc. etc.
Not to say there aren't lots of really great things that actually are produced on a laptop (I've heard some really cool stuff on MySpace, believe it or not), but there are still about as much costs involved if one really needs to take one's endeavor "to the next level" (ugh - I hate that phrase, sorry)
Rolling Stone - ugh...
But apart from that, producers have been doing that for a lot longer, years before the prevalence of mp3s. But for the same inane reasoning: louder is better. The illusion is that it is better, but the fatiguing/loss-of-interest effect certainly holds true.
Even if the music was any good...;^)
Can't say I've tried it with music, but on digital TV I notice that (on the lower bitrate channels), the older, lower-quality videos always seem to suffer much worse than the clean, new material. Well that certainly may be true, but there are also many other factors. It's a long, horrible chain of events from the sparkly new master recording to the standard "music video" presentation. Back in Flock Of Seagull's time it was a whole different set of pitfalls than now, but they all serve to basically degrade sound/visual quality. (Don't even get me started on Time-Warner Cable's "video on demand")
The problem is that all the analysis above wasn't in your original comment; it wasn't even implied. All that contained was the implication that the only problem with DRM-encoded AAC was the inconvenience of ripping it... You're right, I did make several assumptions (and see what happens? I can hear my 7th grade teacher now...) I certainly didn't mean to imply that there was only that one problem with DRM material, rather that the sonic problems with AAC, mp3 and everything else are basically the same problems we all had with music before digital - the degradation that happens when we have to a) duplicate, and b) compress. Again, back in Dick Dale's time it was rust and mylar and radio waves, but things still can just get crappy quite easily. Better to just go see a live show. Except for the parking and expensive drinks.
w-e-l-l... I depends on the music for me.
a) Most rock/punk that I listen to doesn't exactly start off sounding really great and pristine in the first place.
b) I always choose a higher/lower encoding rate depending on the situation (a demo that I'm supposed to listen to for work purposes and will be deleted gets a lower rate, while something I'll actually listen to recreationally would get a higher rate (again, depending on the type of music - my live recordings of X from 1982 and the 2004 recording by the Bonn Beethoven Orchestra of the Shostakovich 5th are two different things entirely.) And sometimes I'll just go AIFF.
c) "Sonic quality" and "the things that music gives us" are two totally separate things. Like we say in the reccording industry, "If the singer is awful, then it won't matter what microphone you use; if the singer is great, the it won't matter what microphone you use."
d) Everyone consumes music differently (as well they should). Some are going to have very expensive, all analog home theater systems and only listen to pristine vinyl; others are going to stick those annoying pods in their ears; some just have little boomboxes or desktop speaker sytems to listen to while they code or design their next restaurant menu; some will be driving in their car powered by 1000W of door-rattling low end, and some will be hearing their favorite Lil' Kim recording as a ringtone off of their little Samsung phone. The effects of reimporting files are often way more negligible then the effects of the user environment, because in the long run, see c).
e) Many people's hearing is damaged enough to where they won't even miss all that "air" above 4k in the latest Slumber Party Girls track. See d).
f) I myself have some suffered some small bit of hearing damage, though nothing near catastrophic. It stems from playing, composing, recording and producing music most of my life. But I doubt anyone that knows me and has worked with me would ever call me "clothears".
They would, however, call me "smartass"... and I would totally agree with them!:^)
This is great! Soon I can stop the relatively painless process of burning all my DRM tunes to audio CD and then re-importing them as nice manageable mp3s. God, that used to take minutes and minutes...
"The New Scientist says that software capable of recognising emotions just by looking at photographs could lead to PCs that adjust their response depending on the user's mood. "
Ooh, I want to be the first to get a mood PC...
Yes, the music industry IS dumb... but in this case, this silly stock-market model idea is Adam's...
"Isn't 99 cents too much to pay for music that appeals to just a few people?"
That's crazy... it shouldn't matter who else likes what you like. If I like something a LOT, I pay a LOT. Who cares if my friends hate it?
well, duh...
I say this all the time, (pissing many colleagues off, since I'm part of the "Music Industry") - Get over copy protection, that genie's been out of the bottle for a long time, and it ain't going back in. Try making better music instead. EOF.
It's a part of life. It's the same as the telephone, or lightbulbs, or even a piano. That all falls under the heading of technology for me. I have a 20-month old, and for awhile I worried about the very same thing. Then I realized it's not worth worrying about. Just do what comes naturally, they'll probably follow you, as someone else pointed out. Or not...
I've got the Smart Alec for traipsing across town (NYC), and the Brain Bag for traveling. I play in a band that tours a lot, and I've been lots of places, lots of different countries, lots of airplanes, buses and concert venues with these things. They're great, and nothing has happened to any of my laptops in the two years since I started using them.
Slashdot Mirror
So to me, on the one hand the industry has indeed solidified, calcified even... but on the other hand it seems to be liquefying - the ground keeps shifting beneath everyone's feet, throwing everybody off balance, and everyone's wondering what to do. It's the huge conglomerates who have the toughest time, like a huge steamship trying to turn on a dime to avoid the big glacier. Us guys in the small speedboats can zigzag around and back a lot easier, even though the waters are still treacherous.
So I leave you with one of my favorite quotes about our beloved industry. It pretty much accurately reflects the often brutal and sad process of "natural selection" that is at work. Not pretty, definitely not perfect or what I would like, but it's what we got. (sigh)
I'm off to revel now... have a Happy New Year!
For a studio owner? Oh yes, life was (and still is) brutal. Those huge Neve or SSL consoles are a million or more. That, along with the cost of everything else, drove strong men to weep and lose their sanity on a regular basis. Huge nut every month...
:^)
I think in a weird way it's way cheaper and just as expensive these days to produce music. The lines are definitely blurring between artist/label, or artist/engineer, labe/distributor, artist/distributor/road manager... it's freaky, it's really cool - just a pain in the ass to sort out and impossible to put in neat little boxes.
The real boon, I think, is that more and more people (including the "5 weird dudes with a tape recorder" - love it!) are able to jump in and try the music-making game. It might be that as more and more people get to achieve fairly good results for very little money, they will begin to recognize that the old-style "big mega-stars" are not in fact, gods, and that what really counts actually is talent and hard work. I'm hopeful that it will induce "professional" musicians, artists and maybe even the "Industry" (ugh) to stop putting out so much garbage.
Ah, such is the glory and mystery of music. Well, that and Britney Spears on the MTV Video Awards. I mean, a little garbage is okay...
Your absolutely right, the costs for those particular things has definitely come way down, thank god.
It's a bit different for a band or singer-songwriter these days. I could do an album right now, for free, with the technology we have today. As long as I have the software. Which could range from free (very poor choice), cracked or stolen (even poorer), a couple of hundred dollars to about $10,000. Oh, and a good mic if I want to actually sing. I should also have a couple of backup drives (200-300 bucks), because if my main hard drive crashes, I have to start over again. And that would mean more time, which actually does equal money. (I am excluding other things like good pre-amps, plug-ins, cost of a computer powerful enough to run the software, etc). Oh, and a couple of hundred dollars if I want to actually put it on a CD and distribute it at my shows, as well as the time that it will take to actually burn all those CDs. Hmm, should probably have some kind of artwork, I suppose.
Or I could use a replication house, like Discmakers. Actually a pretty good deal, 1000 discs for about $1000, artwork, jewel case and labels included.
Maybe I'll just forget CDs altogether and distribute Internet-only. Cool, 99 cents for every song! Minus, of course what CD Baby and iTunes takes from that. But it's still way better thhan what major labels used to screw artists with.
But how do I distinguish myself from the 30,000 other artists out there who did the same thing?
and so on...
The most beautiful and the most frustrating thing about music is that it is by far the most abstract and invisible of all the arts, shrouded in one of the most opaque and cloudy business models ever.
Whee!
Yes, true, anyone can make anything very cheaply, I try to do that myself all the time!
I also know that it didn't used to cost "hundreds of thousands" necessarily. That was the domain of the over-inflated mega-rockstar budgets. I've worked on many albums that had those kinds of budgets. Most of that money went to food, hotels, airfare, transportation, "handlers", personal chefs, etc., all of a very lavish nature. (Not begrudging them either, I think people should have fun with their money). But it would have been possible even in the 70s to go into a studio with a well-rehearsed band of people that could actually play and sing and crank out ten songs for less than 5000 bucks.
Also: use a cheap ($100) mixer and "a little bit of imagination" is not a guarantee of really great sound. Mic'ing is most definitely a science and an art. I don't for the life of me know how the really good engineers in the world do it. And very cheap mixers have too little dynamic headroom. Not to mention that a really good chamber orchestra costs an awful lot (especially in the US).
But there is quite the spectrum however. And that's what I love about music - it covers the entire range of end users, from the guy in the old Buick playing his music through a little 2-inch speaker to the HD home theater buffs.
And having said all that (gasp), an old adage: If the singer is amazing, it doesn't matter what microphone you use. If the singer is lousy... well.. it doesn't matter what microphone you use.
from the article:
"Recording costs have declined to almost zero. Artists used to need the labels to bankroll their recordings. Most simply didn't have the $15,000 (minimum) necessary to rent a professional studio and pay an engineer and a producer. For many artists -- maybe even most -- this is no longer the case. Now an album can be made on the same laptop you use to check email."
As much as I used to like the Heads, Mr. Byrne, like most of his ilk, exists in a vacuum. (Not his fault, really)
If one defines "album" as a collection of "sound organizations" (or songs), then the above is certainly true. But he should talk to all the singers, songwriters and musicians out here that want to do "different" things - like have a real string quartet or chamber orchestra, or a really good gospel choir, or record the interplay between a great jazz drummer and an insane guitar shredder, or do an HD video release of the recording session, etc. etc.
Not to say there aren't lots of really great things that actually are produced on a laptop (I've heard some really cool stuff on MySpace, believe it or not), but there are still about as much costs involved if one really needs to take one's endeavor "to the next level" (ugh - I hate that phrase, sorry)
And they wonder why they're "suffering" from a sales "slump"... RIAA, Go Away!
Rolling Stone - ugh... But apart from that, producers have been doing that for a lot longer, years before the prevalence of mp3s. But for the same inane reasoning: louder is better. The illusion is that it is better, but the fatiguing/loss-of-interest effect certainly holds true. Even if the music was any good... ;^)
w-e-l-l... I depends on the music for me. a) Most rock/punk that I listen to doesn't exactly start off sounding really great and pristine in the first place. b) I always choose a higher/lower encoding rate depending on the situation (a demo that I'm supposed to listen to for work purposes and will be deleted gets a lower rate, while something I'll actually listen to recreationally would get a higher rate (again, depending on the type of music - my live recordings of X from 1982 and the 2004 recording by the Bonn Beethoven Orchestra of the Shostakovich 5th are two different things entirely.) And sometimes I'll just go AIFF. c) "Sonic quality" and "the things that music gives us" are two totally separate things. Like we say in the reccording industry, "If the singer is awful, then it won't matter what microphone you use; if the singer is great, the it won't matter what microphone you use." d) Everyone consumes music differently (as well they should). Some are going to have very expensive, all analog home theater systems and only listen to pristine vinyl; others are going to stick those annoying pods in their ears; some just have little boomboxes or desktop speaker sytems to listen to while they code or design their next restaurant menu; some will be driving in their car powered by 1000W of door-rattling low end, and some will be hearing their favorite Lil' Kim recording as a ringtone off of their little Samsung phone. The effects of reimporting files are often way more negligible then the effects of the user environment, because in the long run, see c). e) Many people's hearing is damaged enough to where they won't even miss all that "air" above 4k in the latest Slumber Party Girls track. See d). f) I myself have some suffered some small bit of hearing damage, though nothing near catastrophic. It stems from playing, composing, recording and producing music most of my life. But I doubt anyone that knows me and has worked with me would ever call me "clothears". They would, however, call me "smartass"... and I would totally agree with them! :^)
This is great! Soon I can stop the relatively painless process of burning all my DRM tunes to audio CD and then re-importing them as nice manageable mp3s. God, that used to take minutes and minutes...
yeah, same here... maybe 30 seconds to change keyboard repeat rate. If I can't operate the thing after 2 chilled Grey Gooses, I don't bother.
"The New Scientist says that software capable of recognising emotions just by looking at photographs could lead to PCs that adjust their response depending on the user's mood. " Ooh, I want to be the first to get a mood PC...
Yes, the music industry IS dumb... but in this case, this silly stock-market model idea is Adam's... "Isn't 99 cents too much to pay for music that appeals to just a few people?" That's crazy... it shouldn't matter who else likes what you like. If I like something a LOT, I pay a LOT. Who cares if my friends hate it?
"it might reduce the incentive to invest in new talent."
I agree, they don't really invest in "new talent" so much as create pop constructs for mostly the Big 5's benefit. (Or is it only 4 now?)
well, duh... I say this all the time, (pissing many colleagues off, since I'm part of the "Music Industry") - Get over copy protection, that genie's been out of the bottle for a long time, and it ain't going back in. Try making better music instead. EOF.
It's a part of life. It's the same as the telephone, or lightbulbs, or even a piano. That all falls under the heading of technology for me. I have a 20-month old, and for awhile I worried about the very same thing. Then I realized it's not worth worrying about. Just do what comes naturally, they'll probably follow you, as someone else pointed out. Or not...
I've got the Smart Alec for traipsing across town (NYC), and the Brain Bag for traveling. I play in a band that tours a lot, and I've been lots of places, lots of different countries, lots of airplanes, buses and concert venues with these things. They're great, and nothing has happened to any of my laptops in the two years since I started using them.