Taking Issue with A Talking Head
By now, most people with an interest in the music industry have seen David Byrne’s article in Wired.
He makes an awful lot of good points, but I think he misses the mark in a few spots. First off, he kind of neglects to mention that one thing the label system – both major and indie – offers the artist is time. Yes, an artist *can* do everything him/herself like Aimee Mann and Radiohead etc. But what struggling musician really has the time to write and record, stuff envelopes, design ads and promotional stuff, make contacts with distro networks, handle accounting, and all that incidental stuff all while ostensibly still working a day job to pay for it and maintaining the kind of normal human social interactions required to actually have material to write about? Sure, it can be done and I know a lot of people who do it, but it really only works well on a small scale. 1000 units, sure. 5000 units, great. 10000? Suddenly fulfilling orders is taking more time than writing music, but it’s not enough orders that you can quit your day job. Digital distro takes the edge off there, certainly but it’s not quite a big enough share of the proverbial pie yet to allow a musician to abandon traditional physical media.
The artists that get away with it have already had the foot-in-the-door exposure and have rasied the capital such that they can afford to hire managers and lackeys (or their bands are big enough that they can farm envelope-licking out to the drummer) and they’ve had enough exposure in the past that they have a name to trade on. If this were Radiohead’s debut, would the press have jumped all over the fact that In Rainbows was released digitally without a major label? In short, having a privileged starting position makes a big difference when trying to go it alone.
My biggest quibble is with the his statement that production costs are “effectively zero” because you can record on “the same laptop you check your email with.”
This is, for all practical purposes, bullshit.
Okay, for the most basic, basic setup, you can buy a mac laptop preloaded with Garageband and the basic loop/instrument packs. You can conceivably record an album with just that. But that is an incredibly narrow, narrow case, since unless you’re really, really lucky it’s going to sound like ass. Why? Well, the computer speakers are terrible for mixing music. So you need decent headphones at the very least, or some adequate monitor speakers.
Now, what if you want to do something like add vocals or record a guitar? You need a mic. You can get a mic that plugs right into the back of your computer. They even make some USB mics and cables for guitars. Great! That’s still greater than zero. But what if you want to use a better mic than the BigBoxStore USB Gamer special? Howsabout the industry-standard Shure SM57? That’s a hundred bucks and…guess what, it doesn’t plug right into the back. Now you need an audio interface. These can be had for a hundred bucks at the low end, up to thousands for the high end ones.
And of course, instruments. You wanna add a guitar, you actually need a guitar. Unless you think Garageband’s samples do what you need already.
Oh, okay, say you’re a laptop rocker, you don’t need those fancy instruments or microphones or whatever. Fair enough. You still need software. What comes with your brand new laptop will, except in specialized cases, not do what you want it to. This is where it adds up. Sure, it’s a lot cheaper than buying a modular synth and racks of effects used to be, but sequencers, plug-in effects, softsynths…even with the plethora of freeware out there you’re going to need to drop a little cash. Sometimes more than a little. Sometimes a lot. (Of course, there’s the alternative of software piracy, but the law looks upon that as “theft” so we won’t consider that a viable option.)
Then, of course, for actually producing physical media, there are some costs. It’s not terrible, you can get a hundred CDRs duplicated for $100. If you want it to sound professional you can pay somoene to master it for you, but this isn’t required by the process, it’s just highly recommended.
These are *minimum* specifications, too. For most people, a cheaply-mic’ed, headphone-monitored, freeware/Garageband-only unmastered digital-only will simply not be good enough.
Let’s look at a more average “bedroom” studio (prices are very approximate averages)…
Basic DAW software (Cubase SE, Logic Express, FL Studio, Reason) : $200
Entry-level (i.e. actually made for music) powered monitor speakers: $250
Shure SM-57 Mic: $100
Decent 2-channel Audio interface: $150
MIDI/Keyboard Controler: $100
Cost to press 1000 CDs in jewel cases: $1000
This does not factor in things like “software for desiging the cover art/paying friend with artistic talent”, hosting an artist website, paying someone like TuneCore or whatnot for a digital distro agreement, printing flyers, and doing all the stuff that accompanies an album release. In the end it comes to maybe about 2 grand total. Which isn’t a whole lot, but it’s a nontrivial amount for most people, and it’s also just a base price. You can spend that much on software alone, a good workhorse vocal mic can run $300-1500, etc.
So while I agree that the cost of making an album has dropped a lot – it’s now in the thousands instead of the tens of thousands, it is not effectively zero, despite what the esteemed Mr. Byrne says. You could make one for free on your email laptop, but it’s unlikely that it’d be one that an artist would be happy with.
