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A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

rootsmusic.ca

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Re: A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

#91

Post by derefr »

mirimir wrote: post #85
eatmyshorts wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think they figured it out early? Go listen to some Miles Davis recordings from the late 50s. Analog tape, two mics, and that was it. And it still sounds better than almost everything made since. Studio-quality analog has had better than CD-quality audio since the late 50s (lower noise, more headroom). With "modern" studio techniques we've adopted multitrack recording, close mic'ing of instruments, and what not. W…

> Studio-quality analog has had better than CD-quality audio since the late 50s (lower noise, more headroom). I'm not sure what you mean by "studio-quality analog". If you literally mean playback from professional studio gear, what's the relevance? What consumers could buy was records. And records are temperamental. For decent sound quality, you needed expensive turntables. Also a clean environment. If you used mass-…

> what's the relevance? What consumers could buy was records.

This subthread, starting from the GGGP, is about digital vs. analogue in the recording+editing+mastering process, not digital vs. analogue in the dubbing+reproduction process.

The relevance is that, despite the introduction of studio-side digital sampling, it made sense (and still makes sense!) to keep to analogue "working copies" (or at least higher-sample-rate lossless digital "working copies") as long as possible in the process, because the point you dub over to 16-bit LPCM ("CD-quality") digital is the point where you throw away information—and audio engineers in the 70s and 80s who didn't realize this are responsible for a fair number of these awful-sounding releases.

Re: A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

#92

Post by chmod775 »

I decided to fact-check one random thing while skimming the article, and of course the article got it wrong. Makes me wary of the whole thing.

> With the addition of multi -track recording, invented by jazz guitarist Les Paul, another golden age of recording began.

No he didn't. He was just the first person to buy a system capable of doing so [1], though he had some influence on the development of that particular system. In reality it was a lot of incremental work by many different people. There was also people experimenting with "homemade" stuff long before the first commercial system.

Giving all the credit to the one guy who was already famous, just because he happens to be a known figure, always irks me.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_multitrack_recordin...

Re: A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

#93

Post by mirimir »

derefr wrote: post #91
mirimir wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Studio-quality analog has had better than CD-quality audio since the late 50s (lower noise, more headroom). I'm not sure what you mean by "studio-quality analog". If you literally mean playback from professional studio gear, what's the relevance? What consumers could buy was records. And records are temperamental. For decent sound quality, you needed expensive turntables. Also a clean environment. If you used mass-…

> what's the relevance? What consumers could buy was records. This subthread, starting from the GGGP, is about digital vs. analogue in the recording+editing+mastering process, not digital vs. analogue in the dubbing+reproduction process. The relevance is that, despite the introduction of studio-side digital sampling, it made sense (and still makes sense!) to keep to analogue "working copies" (or at least higher-sampl…

Ah. OK. Thanks.

Re: A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

#94

Post by anigbrowl »

lovehashbrowns wrote: post #80
Townley wrote: post #73

A few weeks ago, one of my favorite artists came out with a new album. The day I tried it out, I played through it several times. My brain was invigorated, my blood was pumping, and I had an abnormally productive day of coding. That day of productive coding produced tens of thousands of dollars of value for my company. That's value that, at least partially, wouldn't exist without the artist's new album. My company wi…

Solutions already exist. Bandcamp allows artists to let users pick their price, and services like Patreon allow you to support the artist directly. So all of this would have actually been more difficult in the "good old days," and you now have more ways of supporting your favorite artist however much you want.

And those solutions are not so great for quite a variety of artists, which is what this story is about. Network effects force everyone to deal with a small number of platform vendors who dominate their market.

Re: A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

#95

Post by jjeaff »

anigbrowl wrote: post #79
jedberg wrote: post #6

For all of human history, we've been making music and art. And for almost all of that time, it was done for love of doing, not money. For a few hundred years, there was the patronage era, where if you were really good you could get a rich person to feed and clothe and house you while you made art. Or you traveled around giving performances for money or food or clothes or shelter. Then only in the last 100ish years ha…

This argument crops up on every discussion of this topic. Why is it always people who work in the arts always told their work isn't worthy of payment except when delivered under certain conditions? If you don't think artists should be paid, then neither should programmers.

Saying there isn't a market for something is not the same as saying they aren't worthy of being paid.

Re: A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

#96

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

jerf wrote: post #90
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any overtones that are missing in the recording are overtones that didn't make it through the human ear in the first place. Even if human beings cannot hear higher frequencies directly, they can hear the beats produced when higher frequencies sound at the same time as lower, directly audible ones. This has sometimes been exploited for musical purposes and I do wonder if this plays some role in some listeners’ feeli…

If the beats are audible, they're "real" and recordings will pick them up just fine. You don't need to record the original ultrasound to hear them. You still can't hear the inaudible frequencies, at the risk of stating a tautology. You can make some small case for lower frequencies, because even if they are not audible they get to the point where other senses can pick them up too. A sufficiently loud 1Hz wave is simp…

They are an artifact, a side effect, of the way human hearing works, they are not actually present on a recording medium (only the frequencies that produce the effect in the human ear are).

Re: A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

#97

Post by analog31 »

jdietrich wrote: post #60
jedberg wrote: post #6

For all of human history, we've been making music and art. And for almost all of that time, it was done for love of doing, not money. For a few hundred years, there was the patronage era, where if you were really good you could get a rich person to feed and clothe and house you while you made art. Or you traveled around giving performances for money or food or clothes or shelter. Then only in the last 100ish years ha…

>I think people making money making music was an aberration in history, not "the way it should be". Absolute nonsense. We have evidence of professional musicians dating back to at least ancient Egypt. Plato complained in his writings about popular musicians holding unruly concerts. The invention of recorded music was a disaster for professional musicians, because it rendered most of them unemployed. People of the pas…

Indeed, also churches had music, and education included music. Bach was an employee of a city, assigned to work for the local church, which included composing, managing the choir, teaching, and performing at services. He quibbled with his employers about pay.

Music education is still an OK income source.

Re: A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

#98

Post by ken »

skookumchuck wrote: post #24
Pfhreak wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For all of human history, we've been making music and art. And for almost all of that time, it was done for love of doing, not money. This seems wildly improbable to me? People didn't get paid for art until a few hundred years ago? Are you suggesting artisans weren't a thing? That all the art produced globally outside of the past few hundred years was done just for love of doing?

I've never heard of artisans getting wealthy before the 20th century.

Not even Antonio Stradivari?

Re: A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

#99

Post by blihp »

eatmyshorts wrote: post #54
criddell wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wonder how some bands (like Dire Straits) seemed to figure this stuff out so early on while a decade later others struggled to do the same.

You think they figured it out early? Go listen to some Miles Davis recordings from the late 50s. Analog tape, two mics, and that was it. And it still sounds better than almost everything made since. Studio-quality analog has had better than CD-quality audio since the late 50s (lower noise, more headroom). With "modern" studio techniques we've adopted multitrack recording, close mic'ing of instruments, and what not. W…

I think what's being referred to was the shoddy way many musicians and producers used digital technology and basically just digitized an analog recording without even bothering to get mixing or levels right on the analog side. Dire Straits in particular was an early adopter of a fully digital pipeline[1] in the studio and used it very well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brothers_in_Arms_(album) was notable as being one of the first CDs recorded as DDD as opposed to AAD (https://www.danielmcadam.com/AAD-ADD-DDD.html) which was much more common in the 80's. It's still sounds great today IMO.

Re: A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

#100

Post by Hasz »

MereInterest wrote: post #8

> However, with a sampling rate of 44,000 samples per second, there were overtones of sound now missing. Human hearing only goes up to 20 kHz when you are young, dropping to about 12 kHz at the age of 50. 44 kHz sampling gives a Nyquist frequency of 22 kHz, easily encompassing the full range of human hearing. Any overtones that are missing in the recording are overtones that didn't make it through the human ear in th…

Analog introduces it's own set of distortions into the final sound -- it's simply a preference for that style of distortion.

Totally duplicate on modern equipment though, no $1000 cables needed.

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