(Music Production) Plug-In Capitalism

(Music Production) Plug-In Capitalism
bellonamag.com

Lol. Most producers talk about how the plugins are fairly interchangeable, and almost none of them will really change how you work or the sound you get. The VST / plugin market seems really saturated. Not like it’s so saturated that you can’t make money, but any problem you want solved is likely solved by a battery of different plugins.

People fetishize hardware and talk about how it’s essential to the sound that they want, and usually, when you dig into it, you can replace 95% of your hardware with something else and end up with something nearly indistinguishable. There might be some synth or guitar pedal that you are in love with, or even several, but it rarely turns out to be critical to your personal sound. Like, if you want to sound like Van Halen, maybe you want to buy an EVH cab, but don’t bother tracking down exact replicas of guitars and amps… despite the fact that fans obsess over his guitars and amps, that stuff is easy to replicate.

The software side is similar, it’s just that most people don’t fetishize specific pieces of software beyond, say, drooling over a few big names like Serum, Omnisphere, or Pro Tools.

> Once monopolisation is achieved, enclosure accelerates, locking users into an ecosystem with few alternatives or competitors.

I’m not convinced monopolization is going to happen. What I see happening today is that the software and hardware is so cheap it’s ridiculous. The prices have been falling for ages. More companies are making this stuff than ever before. The platform seems wide open. Tons of free VSTs, even good ones, abound from tons of different software companies. Real analog synth hardware is way cheaper (Behringer) than it ever was, even in nominal dollars.

Meanwhile, a lot of the stuff you see at music stores seems to be glorified toys. DAWless setups aimed at Instragram or YouTube which are terrible for producing music, but look good on video. I’m not trying to be gatekeeper here and say what “real music” is, or how you should make it, but there are segments of the music equipment industry which are competing against Lego. That’s where the money is.

After all, real, working musicians seem to have less money these days, so it’s only natural that the industry shifts. As far as I can tell, this is what an infusion of capital will be aiming at—people with discretionary income that love music toys (whether or not they actually make music with it—it varies).

That quote from Adorno is really wedged in there, I guess you gotta show off who you read.

It’s a not very subtle attack on music software though the lens of oppression, and even making the software more accessible is seen as bad because they didn’t make unique music with it. It’s like not knowing how to play a Stradivarius and so the violin is the issue, not the player who didn’t use it properly. It’s quit telling they don’t publish the music they made, or show samples, it’s a bad artist blaming everything but themselves for the bad music they made.

>Francisco’s agenda is clear: democratization leads to consolidation, which leads to platformization, which leads to profits.

No its not clear, its their fantasy projected.

>Adobe, whose extortionate Creative Cloud suite includes Photoshop, Lightroom, InDesign, and Premiere Pro, has near-monopolistic control of visual and design culture, as well as the education institutions that teach art and design. It is now essentially a compulsory investment for the precarious creative worker in those fields; the means of cultural production are being rebranded as capital investments.

What does this mean? It has a monopoly over design culture? So all art made with Adobe looks the same? You can tell if art was made with photoshop? You can tell what photos were edited by Lightroom? You didn't need to buy them before since now the means of cultural production are being rebranded as capital investments?

>Musicians need more recourse to seize their means of production.

The companies release plugins and cheaper software, what does this phrase even mean? Do they have a monopoly? Do they not have the ability to produce music now? Do free alternatives not exist? Why is the writer so bothered by this specific one?

> According to Angela McRobbie, this centralized model has morphed into what is now described as the ‘creative industries,’ which privileges the economizing of individual self-expression, subjects it to the free market in lieu of government funding or patronage, and downplays the collective identities that help to create politically engaged art and culture.

Who? Some random name that I never heard of? What does this mean? Products are cheaper and more accessible, so it’s economizing self expression? They want the government to pay musicians since that’s how all music was made before these plugins?

You can’t make political art or culture since these tools are too white or colonialist and you can’t have creatives collaborate or have a collective identity?

> Despite non-Western tuning systems being easy to implement in theory, they are not readily accessible for most software instruments, an issue that musician and researcher Khyam Allami has recently addressed with his transcultural generative music apps.

They’re easy to implement, yet the people saying it’s easy can’t implement it themselves and they’re complaining about it while relying on a corporation to make it? How ridiculous is this?

Several examples were given, referencing available music scales and tools for eliminating dialect and individual variation. They also gave citations for what they meant where they introduced this complaint. [1]

1. Philip Ewell, ‘Music Theory and the White Racial Frame’ Music Theory Online, 26(2), 2020 https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.20.26.2/mto.20.26.2.ewell.html>. ↑