The RIAA Armageddon has begun

@ Hurting, I'd agree that "no advance equals different recording dynamic" but I'd disagree that it means a tangible change in the quality or content of the music recorded. I do think Steely Dan could exist today, recording-wise, no question.

I disagree. I mean:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aja_(album)#Personnel

Most of these guys existed at all only because there was such a thing as steady, paying studio work. I.e. they could be full-time musicians, practice for job-like hours every day they weren't in session, focus on their craft, get tons of experience, etc. And Steely Dan could pay each of them to come in and lay down maybe a single solo on a single track. Obv some will say good riddance to that, it's awfully decadent, etc. But it's a different world, regardless, from the one where you get your friend who kind of played the cello in high school to lay down a bassline consisting mostly of the roots of a four-chord progression.

^^^

this is huge imho

aren't John Mayer and his tattoos positioning themselves as the studio rats of tomorrow?

and, guys, there are still hundreds of country sessioneers who still eke out a quite decent living under the old studio session system

I mean I don't want to paint too stark a picture. There will probably always be a supply of starving jazz school dudes who work as baristas, shed at night, and will lay down drum tracks for their bushwick loftmates.

you don't have to say 'good riddance to that' to realize that its a model that wasn't gonna last forever

Man there are dozens of gospel and COGIC gospel recordings I could link to right now that were made for peanuts and would blow the mind of any Aja fan

it's amazing it lasted as long as it did

xp

Man there are dozens of gospel and COGIC gospel recordings I could link to right now that were made for peanuts and would blow the mind of any Aja fan

presumably those are more about the performances than the recording itself

"Scott: do people really ask that much for Ray Lamontagne?"

ha, every once in a while. he's big around here. top two acts people ask for the most - that i usually don't have - would be townes van zandt and os mutantes.

presumably those are more about the performances than the recording itself

but the performances make the recording!

i want frogbs tempbanned just for consistently pulling this thread off the trail of interesting/productive discussion about as much as i ever wanted him tempbanned for making creepy racial comments

but the performances make the recording!

that's not what I'm getting at. Aja is praised as much for its SOUND - for how it's engineered, how the instruments are recorded and processed, how everything sounds so fucking clean and shiny and shrink-wrapped - as for its display of studio-musician-chops.

yeah as much as i hate what the big labels did to people - and minority artists definitely got the brunt of the awfulness - the reason i'm stuck in the 70's (and the 60's and 50's) is the sound. tons of people got to experiment in big studios with great gear and great players and good engineers/etc and that ain't ever gonna happen again. even if they only got a day to record, they got to record in some great places.

there were several elements that went into the finely tuned machine that was Steely Dan - impeccable mastery of the most expensive studio equipment of the time, high quality session musicians, and excellent songwriting - and all but maybe one of them (the songwriting) are pretty much unachievable without a lot of time and money.

xp

scott OTM and recording studios are gonna start to die out too (if they aren't already) due to a lack of a customer base. increasing numbers of people are just gonna think they can do all their shit on a laptop and who cares cuz no one's paying for it anyway and all that expensive studio machinery and engineering expertise is going to become more and more rare.

and I say this as someone who loves and has engaged in a lot of "lo-fi" stuff. there's gonna be a lot more of it in the future.

While all this is going on:

http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/industry/record-labels/lyor-cohen-on-music-s-future-i-hate-when-1007360752.story

yeah its sad. and the only people who will care about good recordings will be horrible people like jack white. sorry, i haven't said anything bad about him in a while. i try to monthly.

there will never be another motown in our lifetimes. or blue note. or atlantic. etc. etc.

but on the positive side, experimental musicians and electronic musicians have been and are doing amazing things with digi tech. and there are fancy classical and jazz discs that are pretty phenomenal sound-wise. i will probably never love them as much as the old sounds, but i do appreciate the efforts.

We'll always have John Mayer.

scott OTM and recording studios are gonna start to die out too (if they aren't already) due to a lack of a customer base. increasing numbers of people are just gonna think they can do all their shit on a laptop and who cares cuz no one's paying for it anyway and all that expensive studio machinery and engineering expertise is going to become more and more rare.

― a dense custard of infinity (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, June 20, 2012 6:41 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

i always wonder when that's gonna happen, but all the low/mid-level studios i know seem to be doing well, or at least adapting and surviving. i know the big budget studio world has suffered, but i wonder if that's happening at all strata of that industry.

those studios still seem to do a lot of mixing and/or mastering for self-recorded stuff, though

a lot of the best sounding modern CDs i own are by people that 99% of the population will never hear.

someone told me the stones might be recording in greenfield today? oh how the mighty have fallen. but i think its cuz one of keith's guitar tech dudes has a studio down the street.

Y'all should really read some of the tongue baths in that article I linked.

On embracing innovation, Lyor touted that he is the only music executive to have visited the Spotify offices in Sweden. "We should be fully embracing and engaging in what these new companies are doing. In Sweden the people have been living in a growing music economy because of Spotify," he says.

...

"If somebody has a huge online following it means that my competitors already know about them," he explains. "I want to be there early to develop, and I want to build slowly. We prefer to foster them, water and give them sunshine so that they can grow. Malcolm Gladwell says that you have to put in the hours, and nothing is better for development than rolling up your sleeves and working and gigging to make something great. There's a reason we don't hand doctors a scalpel right out of medical school and say "have at it!"

Lyor's claims that follower-bases don't translate into revenues stands in contrast to what the Internet has been able to produce in recent years. One can't simply ignore the commotion Justin Bieber has stirred, and while spotlight performances by Lana Del Rey and Karmin both received harsh reviews by the press, they are doing well sales-wise. Lana Del Rey's debut Born To Die has sold 254,000 copies since January and Karmin's single "Brokenhearted" currently sits at No. 17 on the Hot 100.

On his preferred approach towards fostering artists, Lyor emphasized why he thinks 360 deals are important. "360 is an unpopular word, but I really believe that it's great for the artist and it's great for us. It's great to have people committed to our roster and committed to a relationship. We aren't flipping through our artists, and in many cases less is more."

Green followed up on Cohen's point about 360 deals: "As an artist, you need to incentivize the marketing company," he said, "and the business engine behind your music because if they aren't, they aren't going to do what it takes to move the boulder up the hill."

Ultimately, the panelists agreed that what a music industry wrought with decline and turmoil needs to succeed is camaraderie. "A fraternal and paternal industry, where we form a bond like we did when I joined in 1983," Cohen recalls, "where we'd all hang out and drink together and all root for each other. Let's start with an order, where people aren't rooting for each other's failure." His statement was met with thunderous applause from the audience.

and, again, country sales are still holding steady. Also, country is the only genre in which its artists regularly seek expensive session men.

country fans can't figger out them there newfangled compooters so they have to go on up there to the walmart and git themselves a ceedee! everyone knows that.

In Sweden the people have been living in a growing music economy because of Spotify the government pays you to be an artist," he says

lol scott

altho I was kinda thinking that tbh

"Scott: do people really ask that much for Ray Lamontagne?"

ha, every once in a while. he's big around here. top two acts people ask for the most - that i usually don't have - would be townes van zandt and os mutantes.

― scott seward

I would probably ask for Os Mutantes at some point.

i'm still in the market for country if it helps me complete my homer & jethro collection. i think i have around 20 of their albums. man, there are few things that sound sweeter than an original 50's or early 60's rca pressing of homer & jethro. talk about studio talent!

and, guys, there are still hundreds of country sessioneers who still eke out a quite decent living under the old studio session system

yeah you can hire session cats and they are a joy to work with. there's been a change in the whole culture of recording that's largely down to the digital domain & to being able to fix things - most people think you don't really need a good musician to make a good track. (and you don't, always - there are many different aesthetics - but a good musician is better than a smoothed-and-fixed take from a bad one, imo.) there are some TREMENDOUS producers making rock music who any 70s head should pay attention to, but most of them will tell you that the material they get to work with isn't the kind of stuff people are going to be sufficiently moved by to start asking q's about the nature of the recording.

also, and this is key: producers used to really push artists around. producers answered to label dudes who had a big-picture vision of the market, and they answered to their own idea of what the record ought to sound like. the artist was last in line, which is why a lot of artists who got big enough either learned how to engineer or (as in Dylan's case) got nameless engineer dudes who'd do their bidding & took the production credit themselves. you can be at Village Recorders or Blackbird or wherever but if you've got an artist who doesn't actually know anything about recording who gets the final say on production choices, you're not gonna get much. I'd wager that Steely Dan's attitude toward Katz was "you do your thing, we'll micromanage on the musical side."

i wish i could get behind new stuff more, but, man, i can't help it i hear something old/analog and my brain is on fire. a reggae 45 from the 70's that cost a dollar to make...worth more to me than most of what i hear out there. just talking sound-wise, not even music-wise. i listen to privately recorded folk records from the 70's that people made at home or in tiny studios in the middle of nowhere and they can sound AMAZING. so beautiful. even just a reel to reel recording an acoustic guitar and then pressed to wax can be SO heavenly. people at home now on their computers or home work...sound...stations, just doesn't do it. for me. i'm not a total nostalgia buff either. i like lots of new stuff. i just don't like where a lot of people are going. unless its purely electronic. which would include rap.

"As an artist, you need to incentivize the marketing company," he said, "and the business engine behind your music because if they aren't, they aren't going to do what it takes to move the boulder up the hill."

I kind of get what he's saying, but still...end times.

a lot of the best sounding modern CDs i own are by people that 99% of the population will never hear.

u can't just tease w/out spilling. what are they?

i just mean along the lines of experimental/modern classical CDs that i've had sent to me. european dudes who do sound right. there are great labels that put stuff out that is audiophile-friendly. probably a lot that i've never heard that i couldn't afford! this label for instance does all their new releases on dvd audio and its like being on another planet:

http://www.electrocd.com/en/boutique/empreintesdigitales/

but even people like editions mego make high quality recordings. and techno people probably have their fave sound labels. they're out there, but not the mainstream. even a lot of great clssical labels aren't mainstream.

all that schnittke stuff i got on deutsche grammophon CDs at that library book sale the other day...wow. just wow. i mean i can dig classical people going all digi and shit. (though at the moment i'm listening to a pristine mono columbia recording of the budapest quartet doing brahms quintets right now on vinyl and it is wow in a completely different way.)

the tech is out there. it has been out there! since before compact discs. i love some of the early digital recordings on vinyl. they sound great. its just been this weird one step forward one step back thing as far as pop/rock production goes. i don't know why. i mean their were always bad vinyl recordings too, but they usually weren't unlistenable like bad compact discs/digital productions can be to me. this has nothing to do with the RIAA...sorry.

there will never be another motown in our lifetimes. or blue note. or atlantic. etc. etc.

I basically disagree with the last ~100 posts. I'm no digital apologist, either. Techniques have changed, tastes have changed, equipment has changed, but I just can't agree that it's b/c of deprecated finances. People will happily hire a Timbaland for 10K a song (I'm picking him b/c I know his price); but for 10K in an analog studio you can do So Much.

Immediately Raphael Saadiq springs to mind, The Roots spring to mind-- I guess they're both the same pool-- Dap-Kings, I suppose. You've got Geoff Barrow making the best-'sounding' Kraut records I've heard outside of Can, all to tape, with an old Synthi...

But the part I do agree with is "there will never be another Blue Note" etc., just as there won't be another Radiohead or another Steely Dan. This is not to say that recorded music of that quality and calibre isn't possible to create, and it will be created. But the phenomenology of "super label" and "super band" is gone.

xp: OK, so this isn't about RIAA any more.

@ aero, re: producers. YES yes yes. And there are producers out there who push people around and have a distinct sound but I'm not going to name any of them or state my opinion of their aesthetic

yeah like i said i definitely know that there are people capable of making great sound recordings. because i've heard them. but i just think that it was more the norm than the exception in the times (past) that i'm talking about. and there are all kinds of reasons for that. money is only one reason.

Thanks for the empreintes digitales recommendation, too

there used to be people who would very consciously make records that would sound good on an am transistor radio. just as steely dan and others would try to make the optimum fm radio listening experience. and now people tailor music for phones and computers. lots of highs and not a lot of lows. there are lots of different things that people take into account now. and that's even before you get into hardware and software and technology and recording and producing methods. and i don't always like the results! the cut & paste computer production sounds dead to me a lot of the time. (our lord and saviour max martin being one of the exceptions)

its a preference thing. and an age thing.

that's where i'm at. where the record companies come in as that once upon a time there were some good ears at the big labels. now i wonder if they even listen to what they put out at all. cuz some of it sounds really dreadful and i don't think they really care. a lot of the old villains did care! or at least the people they hired to care would care.

In a way, I appreciate that consensus seemed to be reached in the 70s that dead, reverb-free environments constituted "good" studio sound, and a lot of artists were able to exploit that to the hilt (the Dan, Fleetwood Mac, Parliament). But it also meant that records as seemingly disparate as Darkness on the Edge of Town and Anthony Braxton's Creative Orchestra Music 1976 were hamstrung: as either Landau or Iovine pointed out in The Promise, even a million-selling artist like Springsteen couldn't record in a studio that didn't have carpet on the walls because now all studios had carpet on the walls. Springsteen and Braxton made some of their best work under a thick, shag pile.

"People will happily hire a Timbaland for 10K a song (I'm picking him b/c I know his price); but for 10K in an analog studio you can do So Much."

this is key. and also has to do with not caring. in a way.

Most of these guys existed at all only because there was such a thing as steady, paying studio work.

Not just that: they probably went to public schools with well-funded (or just plain funded) music programs. Such programs are few and far between, and are always first on the chopping block when municipalities make budget cuts.

Meanwhile it's all washed up on Sullivan's shores:

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/06/who-pays-for-music-ctd.html

That link and this one are pretty much mostly responses and arguments so you're warned:

http://www.facebook.com/TheDishBlog/posts/410451945664597

ha: http://www.theonion.com/articles/kid-rock-starves-to-death,342/

linked from the FB comments