Is it a good thing that anyone can be a music producer these days?
1. 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.
2. 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!
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.