People conflate music with the drama that is the allure of quick and easy fame.
The Problem with Music (1993)
51–60 of 101 posts
Re: The Problem with Music (1993)
#52> That’s why few self-respecting engineers will allow themselves to be called “producers.” btw, HN'ers, I'm preparing a new Substack post about "music movies you haven't seen" and one of the ones I saw when it came out was about a recording engineer ! Imagine that. I think Tom Dowd is the only engineer anyone would make a movie about. It's Tom Dowd and the Language of Music and now I can't find it anywhere. Can you?
I found it on a community specializing in out of print media. I'll see if I can get a copy.
Re: The Problem with Music (1993)
#53The irony of this is that a lot of the sound engineering stuff isn't a thing anymore for recorded music - the producers won. If you mic properly and choose a space with the right acoustics you can achieve almost anything with walkthrough GUIs using a DAW and some plugins.
Now I'm confused.
Isn't the "DAW and some plugins" part actually the core of sound engineering nowadays?
Re: The Problem with Music (1993)
#54See also "Courtney Love does the math" (2000) for a similar analysis of the music industry:
Re: The Problem with Music (1993)
#55producer : music :: architect : software.
Re: The Problem with Music (1993)
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Radio is still a thing, and studios decide what goes on there.
Is it though? I grew up in the Bay Area listening to “Live 105” the local Alt-Rock station. It doesn’t even exist anymore. There’s maybe one station on the dial that caters to a demographic younger then 40. I’m not sure radio is still relevant for anyone under the age of 30.
Internet radio is real and thriving. I listen to NTS all the time, e.g.
Re: The Problem with Music (1993)
#57Here is something that may be of use. When someone sends you or hands you a contract, read it. If they hand you a contract and expect you to sign it on the spot either ask to look at it overnight or sit down and read it in the spot. Anyone who expects you to sign something without reading it should feel shady. Read it with a pen in hand. You are allowed to change things in a contract. People often give you things as…
From what I read in the article, you need to also avoid signing anything that says you’ll sign something else later (why in the world is that kind of contract legal?).
Your question makes a mistaken assumption about contracts. Contracts are not "legal" or "illegal", they are "binding" or "non-binding". And a contract that stipulates that you will sign something else later is generally non-binding. The people who ask you to sign such contracts are counting on you not knowing that.
There are several criteria that a contract needs to meet in order to be binding. Interestingly, being written down and signed is not one of them. Verbal contracts can be binding. The reason for writing them down and signing them is to avoid he-said-she-said type arguments if there is a dispute.
One of the criteria for a legally binding contract is that there has to be an actual "meeting of the minds", i.e. that the two parties have to actually agree on what their obligations under the contract actually are. An obligation to sign some unspecified thing in the future does not meet that criterion because you don't know what you are agreeing to.
(For this reason, a ToS "contract" which allows one party to change the terms unilaterally cannot be binding. You have to be given the opportunity to reject the changes.)
But most people don't know these things, and so they allow themselves to be manipulated by charlatans who do.
Disclaimer: IANAL. But I've signed a lot of contracts, some of which I shouldn't have.
Re: The Problem with Music (1993)
#58The irony of this is that a lot of the sound engineering stuff isn't a thing anymore for recorded music - the producers won. If you mic properly and choose a space with the right acoustics you can achieve almost anything with walkthrough GUIs using a DAW and some plugins.
Now I'm confused. Isn't the "DAW and some plugins" part actually the core of sound engineering nowadays?
They are, but the engineering aspect is greatly diminished, which is why these days in music everybody is a producer and audio engineers are more likely to work events or film/tv.
Re: The Problem with Music (1993)
#59Here is something that may be of use. When someone sends you or hands you a contract, read it. If they hand you a contract and expect you to sign it on the spot either ask to look at it overnight or sit down and read it in the spot. Anyone who expects you to sign something without reading it should feel shady. Read it with a pen in hand. You are allowed to change things in a contract. People often give you things as…
From what I read in the article, you need to also avoid signing anything that says you’ll sign something else later (why in the world is that kind of contract legal?).
[deleted]
Re: The Problem with Music (1993)
#60Not knowing too much about sound engineering myself, I tried comparing it to software engineering. At the end of the day what matters is your output and learning along the way. It seems the author has a gripe with people calling themselves producers. If someone said I can’t call myself a software engineer until I had interned at XYZ company and understood Kubernetes, Docker, Typescript, AWS, Rust, etc. I would say ok…
>people calling themselves producers The music industry has just as big a headache with imposter syndrome, the Flynn factor, and the Peter principle, as any other industry. The issue is that the music industry is extremely exploitative, while being undeniably competitive. You don't get coders going to the extremes that members do, for their art. (Not sure if that is a good or bad thing, personally.) >producers and ar…
If you're going to apply that argument you should apply it to everything - music, art, software, money, property of all kinds.
But you won't, because the argument always comes to down to "Stuff I want should be free because I want it. Stuff that profits me personally should have legal and moral protections unless I personally have the luxury of choosing otherwise."
That aside - it's skill too. Of a specific kind. Producers have - actually have always had - two jobs. One is the admin side of delivering the project on time and on budget - which is not as easy as it sounds when band members may be drunk, high, unreliable, on the verge of a personal or professional breakdown, or at war with each other.
The other is having the taste and instinct to hit the market just where it wants to be hit.
Taste and instinct are incredibly nebulous and hard to define, but music buyers know them when they hear them. They're the difference between a record that sounds polished and a record that somehow has a life of its own.
With respect to Albini, having an EE degree has absolutely no relevance to this. If anything it will get in the way, because EE degrees teach you nothing about taste and musicality.
Nor - unfortunately - does talent in the abstract. Some musicians are just too talented for the mainstream. In a saner culture we'd subsidise them - somehow - without relying on the middle-of-the-bell-curve markets to do something they're fundamentally unable to do.