The recording industry has changed its tune over the last ten years and as a result the demographics of artistry and production are more dynamic and fluid than ever seen before. This is the dawn of a new era, in which home-based recording and production can be utilised to create sounds that enable flux and flow in the universal music scene in a way never dreamed of until now.
Producing music at home is easy. All you need is a little bit of talent and a lot of enterprise. If you can read an instruction manual and can carry a tune you can work with Ableton or Sibelius to produce a passable tune. With practice and determination this can become a good tune and then a great track worth slapping your DJ name on and launching into cyberspace. And who knows who could be the next Skrillex or Richie Hawtin, it could be you!
Is it too much to ask that we leave the music-making to the dreamers of dreams? The professionals? Remember them? I don't mind if you want to get up and have a go at karaoke now and then but that doesn't make you Janis Joplin, now does it? In the same way that pressing a few buttons on Logic to make a bloody appalling noise doesn't make you a dubstep artist-cum-producer, just a muppet who doesn't know his arse from his elbow when it comes to decent music.
It is true to say that the industry is shifting, and not all the outcomes of this are good. Most wannabes will remain just that, and there are countless artists out there that will never make it, as they truly aren't good enough. But what about the pioneers of future genres, deemed not marketable by the industry but able to access the people themselves, with self-promotion, entrepreneurial abilities and a real raw talent? The future of the music industry allows people like this a chance.
Half these little buggers are pinching music and ideas and are passing them off as originals. At least the coherent industry of a decade or two ago would have slapped a lawsuit on this faster than you can say Vanilla Ice, even if the regime was a bit Stalinist. No one makes money from music anymore and this is a shame for the handful of great artists that are like diamonds embedded firmly in the mud of cyber-space, lost among the wreckage of a shattered music industry. In my eyes, the dawn of the digital music age has heralded the death of a certain greatness. And that's a crying shame.
Producing music at home is easy. All you need is a little bit of talent and a lot of enterprise. If you can read an instruction manual and can carry a tune you can work with Ableton or Sibelius to produce a passable tune. With practice and determination this can become a good tune and then a great track worth slapping your DJ name on and launching into cyberspace. And who knows who could be the next Skrillex or Richie Hawtin, it could be you!
Is it too much to ask that we leave the music-making to the dreamers of dreams? The professionals? Remember them? I don't mind if you want to get up and have a go at karaoke now and then but that doesn't make you Janis Joplin, now does it? In the same way that pressing a few buttons on Logic to make a bloody appalling noise doesn't make you a dubstep artist-cum-producer, just a muppet who doesn't know his arse from his elbow when it comes to decent music.
It is true to say that the industry is shifting, and not all the outcomes of this are good. Most wannabes will remain just that, and there are countless artists out there that will never make it, as they truly aren't good enough. But what about the pioneers of future genres, deemed not marketable by the industry but able to access the people themselves, with self-promotion, entrepreneurial abilities and a real raw talent? The future of the music industry allows people like this a chance.
Half these little buggers are pinching music and ideas and are passing them off as originals. At least the coherent industry of a decade or two ago would have slapped a lawsuit on this faster than you can say Vanilla Ice, even if the regime was a bit Stalinist. No one makes money from music anymore and this is a shame for the handful of great artists that are like diamonds embedded firmly in the mud of cyber-space, lost among the wreckage of a shattered music industry. In my eyes, the dawn of the digital music age has heralded the death of a certain greatness. And that's a crying shame.