Don't take my word for it that the major labels and the system that propped them up for so many years are dead. John Mellencamp, who sang a string of rock hits back in the 1980s and '90s, thinks the business is dead as well. In an articulate and passionate essay on the Huffington Post, he argues that the long slide started well before the rise of file sharing, back to when the business started relying on SoundScan and Broadcast Data Systems (BDS).
The old way of selling music is as outdated as '80s hairstyles.
(Credit: John Cougar Mellencamp via YouTube)With SoundScan, instead of relying on surveys from record stores, the labels could see exactly how many units were being moved in any given week, and where those sales were happening. With BDS, instead of relying on phone calls to radio program directors, the labels knew exactly how many spins a song was receiving in each city. Shortly thereafter, the Billboard charts began relying on these automated systems as well. The result: labels ignored the vast majority of the country and focused on a few hits that were getting airplay in the largest cities, and allocated their A&R and marketing budgets accordingly. We ended up, according to Mellencamp, with No. 1 hits that most of the country had never heard, and the rest was a long downhill slide to today's hyperfragmented and piracy-ridden market.
It's a great essay, and I particularly like his side note that the CD was created out of pure greed, as a way to get users to replace their collections of perfectly good vinyl records. (Remember how CDs were supposed to offer clear sound forever? Funny, my CDs from the early 1990s are already wearing out and skipping, but I have records from the 1950s that still play adequately.)
But like the folks at Idolator, who called Mellencamp old and dumb, I completely disagree with his conclusion. Mellencamp says that the irrelevance of radio and fragmentation of the market means there's no organic way for music to find an audience and grow. That's completely wrong--there's more opportunity for smaller bands today than there's ever been. Yes, beginning artists might have to do more work themselves, but recording, manufacturing, and distributing an album has never been cheaper or easier. From ProTools to Disc Makers to CD Baby and Tunecore, and more recent competitors like Routenote and Audiolife, these are tools that anybody can use and master. Sure, online marketing through vehicles like MySpace can't compete with mass radio play in 100 cities, but it's available to anybody--not just the companies' chosen few. When you get a bit bigger, you can enlist services like Topspin to hype your product in the digital realm, for far cheaper than an old-fashioned media blitz. Even getting gigs no longer requires a booking agent, thanks to services like Sonicbids.
In one sense, Mellencamp's right: if you're in music to become a rock star, now's a bad time to be a musician. But if you want to have your music heard as broadly as possible, there's never been a better time.
And for those of you who couldn't sing the chorus to Mellencamp's "I Need A Lover" when you read his essay, click here.
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Guitar Hero: Metallica, which lets gamers play along with the band and its influences, comes out in the U.S. on March 29. Metallica lead guitarist Kirk Hammett spoke to me this afternoon at the South by Southwest music festival about the game and other issues related to music and technology.
Q: With the Guitar Hero game, do you think you'll be reaching longtime fans, or is this mainly a way to reach younger fans who might know a song or two but don't really know Metallica?
Hammett: We'll be reaching fans across the board, longtime fans, fans who've just gotten into us, Guitar Hero fans who might have reached Metallica through Guitar Hero. It works in a lot of different directions. Our demographic gets wider and wider through the years; at our shows we see a lot of kids who are 10, 12 years old, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that their parents have been fans for a long time. And a certain percentage of it is because they're Guitar Hero fans and they got turned on to Metallica through Guitar Hero, and they want to actually see Metallica as a live performing band.
Were you a Guitar Hero player before this?
Hammett: I have to say, I've only really played Guitar Hero once. I'm the kind of person who, if I start playing video games, I don't stop. So a few years back, I said to myself that I have to stop playing because I don't play guitar, I don't eat, I don't sleep. I had found out about Guitar Hero from seeing it in the media, seeing the poster on the wall in the studio where we were recording our album, hearing about it from friends. So I did actually play it once, I played against Lars and I beat him. He plays it all the time. But I had to tell him I had a fair advantage being a guitar player myself.
Do you find there's a split between musicians and non-musicians? I think a lot of musicians look at Guitar Hero and say "I'd rather be playing."
Hammett: I never feel like I'm playing my instrument enough. It leads back to what I was saying earlier about being totally obsessive. I've talked to other guitar players who've played this game, it's apples and oranges, it's a different thought process between this and actually playing an instrument.
Do you think kids growing up today are going to be drawn to games like Guitar Hero instead of learning how to play the guitar? Or do you think musicians will always be musicians?
Hammett: I think it's going to be responsible for creating a lot of musicians, for kids making the leap to playing a real instrument. I have a friend who works at a music instrument store, and he told me that because of Guitar Hero, guitar sales are up. For me, that's a great thing because these kids are being brought up on the music that's in Guitar Hero, it's great music, great classic rock, great classic metal that they wouldn't hear otherwise. It's all just about pop drivel on the radio. They're getting an education through Guitar Hero, and if some of these kids are truly inspired, they'll make the leap and grab a guitar and learn how to play the songs for real.
What about the songs from other bands that are in the game? Did you guys pick all of those bands, and were there any specifics that you picked?
Hammett: Well, I wanted UFO to be in there, but for legal reasons we couldn't do it so we had to settle for Michael Schenker Group. Same thing with The Misfits. We would have loved for The Misfits to be on here, but for legal reasons, we have Samhain instead.
Do you have a recording rig that you use to get ideas down outside the studio?
Hammett: Traditionally, I'll use a small recording processor, which I'll eventually load into ProTools. A lot of the stuff written in the last four or five years, I used (Apple's) GarageBand. Then from GarageBand I put it on a CD and then dumped that into ProTools. GarageBand is really handy in that I can just have my laptop, have my guitar, have a guitar cord, and plug my guitar into the laptop. Once I've tweaked it and modified things, and built upon the ideas, I'll put the music into ProTools, which has become the industry standard. So for me, it's really about GarageBand and ProTools.
So you just go direct, you don't even need a microphone?
Hammett: Sometimes I'll use an Mbox, yeah.
I know they captured a lot of moves for the game, how did that work?
Hammett: They filmed us with sensors on us. It was pretty cool. We lip-synced to the songs, and they got full-motion captures of us playing the music. They did full body scans of us as well.We tried to aim it to be as accurate as possible.
A digital-audio workstation is probably the most important purchase an audio engineer has to make--it's the command and control center for your entire computer-based recording rig, and you'll be spending most of your time in it.
Unfortunately, pro-level DAWs are complicated pieces of software, and everybody's got their own opinion about what's best--ProTools is widely considered the industry standard, but I know several experienced engineers who don't like it at all.
Because of its complexity and importance, choosing a DAW is not the kind of decision you can make from reading reviews alone, or even from talking to fellow travelers. You need hands-on time.
That's why Cakewalk has released a free 30-day trial version of Sonar 8 Producer Edition, the newest version of the company's high-end DAW. (Cakewalk also makes a wide array of audio-recording and manipulation software for consumers.) It's available for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows XP or Vista (Mac users need Boot Camp or another Windows emulator). Recordings made with the trial version can be saved permanently.
The download is here.
Last night, my audio production class took a field trip to local studio Glenn Sound for a brief introduction to miking technique: which microhpones to use for a particular sound, where and how to place them, and so on. It wasn't completely foreign to me--I've recorded in probably a dozen studios, but always on the clock and paying by the hour, and audio engineers tend to shrug off poorly-phrased technical questions in favor of showing you the end result.
One of the demonstrations showed us how different distances between microphone and source can give you different sounds. Most rock and pop music engineers tend to use close miking, in which microphones are placed very close to specific parts of an instrument or amplifier. Each microphone might pick up a very different sound--more treble or bass, a stronger attack, and so on. The engineers then blend these parts and add effects to get a specific sound--sometimes similar to the sound of an instrument just playing in the room, sometimes totally different. This technique gives an engineer a lot of control, but requires some extra work in the mixing stage. Classical engineers, in contrast, tend to place microphones far from an instrument in an attempt to capture its natural character, as well as some of the ambient room noise (caused by the sound echoing off walls and other surfaces).
The demonstration featured a piano. The prof set up one set of mics right above the open top of the piano, and another about 12 feet away in the room. (They were two stereo pairs, the closer pair in an X/Y configuration, the farther pair in a Blumlein Array.) As expected, the closer pair had more treble frequencies, a much stronger transient response, and no room noise. A non-engineer would describe it as crisp, clean, and perhaps a little sterile. The farther pair picked up much more close echo and reverb from the walls of the room, leading to a "richer" or "warmer" tone. (Audio professionals scoff at these inexact metaphorical words, but most of us aren't professionals, so I'll stick with this bad habit for now.)
By taking the two tracks together and changing their relative volumes, you can change the tone of the piano recording. For cleaner, brighter sound, you turn up the close mic pair. For a bigger, warmer sound, you turn up the farther pair.
However, because the mic pairs were twelve feet apart, there was a twelve millisecond delay between the two signals. (Useful fact: sound travels about 1 foot per millisecond.) It wasn't quite as bad as hearing each note twice. Instead, each key sounded like the player was holding it down for a little longer than he actually was. No problem--using ProTools, the engineer clicked the room-mic track backward 12 milliseconds, and behold: the two different tones occurred simultaneously.
The engineer thought it sounded better, and the class nodded and agreed. But to me, the delay sounded better. When the delay was eliminated, the overall piano tone lost a lot of what made it interesting--the ambient noise of the room mic seemed to be obscured by the louder attack and additional treble that were picked up by the close mic.
Thirty years ago, when many classic rock recordings were made, correcting this lag would have been far more complicated. I imagine the engineer would have had to take the second track, send it through an outboard unit that added 12 milliseconds of delay, then bounced the result back to a single track. With a drum kit, maybe--you can't have the same drum sound hitting at drastically different times, or you'll end up with clickity clackety mud, which makes the rest of the band sound off time. (Although Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham could sound incredible recorded in a stairwell.) But with this piano, it sounded natural enough without the correction that the engineer probably would have let it pass.
The point: digital workstations allow you an incredible amount of flexibility. You can correct almost anything in the mix. But just because you can doesn't mean you should. Experimentation's great, but restraint can lead to a more traditional--and, to some ears, better--end result.
Last night, I started a professional audio production program at the University of Washington Extension. There are about 40 students in the class. A half dozen or so are like me--in our 30s or older, with full-time careers outside the music industry, but with a longtime interest in recording and a lot of experience writing and playing music.
(Credit:
FL Studio)
But most are full-time students, or between college and graduate school, and are expecting to make a career in the music industry. Some of these kids are frighteningly single-minded--there's an 18-year-old who's been messing around with recording software since he was 9 and claims to be competent on drums, bass, guitar, and keyboards. Nearly all of them have created and recorded many hours of their own music, usually playing all the instruments. Several of them expect to start their own record labels, on which they'll release music by friends and artists they like. Their level of excitement is remarkable to me, given all the doom and gloom about collapsing record sales and the death of the big label system.
But most interesting to me: what software do they use? One guy recorded everything in Garage Band, but the program that kept coming up again and again was Fruity Loops (recently renamed FL Studio).
Nearly everybody who used it prefaced it with some sort of apology--"I know it's not considered a real recording program"--and our instructor didn't mention it among his recommendations of low-cost entry-level software (he's a huge fan of Cubase3 SE for multitrack mixing, even as he acknowledges that Pro Tools is the industry standard for recording). Nonetheless, Fruity Loops seems to be the standard for budding musicians--just like kids used to buy a Strat and a cheap Peavey amp, and maybe a Tascam 4-track tape recorder, now they buy a laptop, MIDI keyboard, and cheap sequencing software.
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