Are we recording too much, too soon?

[Dave Martin]

Reading through the posts in this forum reminded me of something that we discussed last week in the theater where I was working...

Here's the deal: 20 or 30 years ago, 90% of the musicians in the US ONLY played live gigs and seldom (if ever) recorded other than cassettes at live gigs.
These days, it seems like 90% of the musicians ONLY record and seldom (if ever) actually play live in front of a paying audience. It seems to me that the quality of both live gigs and commercially released recordings are suffering - does anyone else see a correlation?

[rduckwor]

Interesting question. In my mind, the music scene is so much more diverse now. Producers are willing to sign, even seeking the small indie groups that might, just might, be tomorrow's money makers for their labels. My thought is that many of these groups have little live experience, oh sure, they've played around a bit, but not really paid their dues in the "old" sense. Many of them are better writers than musicians these days. They get into the studio rather early in their careers, aren't truly the "showmen" (and women) of the old days, and the quality of their playing may well not be up to the standards of the past.

And then again, I may just be a maroon baboon.

[Ben Rolston]

You might be a maroon baboon even if you're right!

[cosmicevan]

Recording is way more accessible now for folks. Heck, even I have a project protools rig in my home (as many other musicians I know). Not only that, but portable recording is even more accessible with digital media - my band records every rehearsal we play.

Additionally, most (decent) clubs won't book you without being able to provide a demo and/or a guaranteed minimum number of people that your band will draw. Mix all that with mp3s, myspace pages, and itunes and a band without ever playing a gig can have a fan base and an album that is already selling.

Great bands can now command hundreds of dollars a ticket for a show. I heard today that the Stones cashed in on half a billion dollars on their last tour. half a BILLION dollars!!! the great live experience is what is worth money, recordings are just a way to spread the word. just my 2 cents...

[The BurgerMeister]

the music biz is in a weird spot right now....

i feel there's a revolution coming. i won't hypothesize about the details... it's just a feeling i've had for a little while. something big's going to happen soon.

[deaf pea]

Originally Posted by Dave Martin

Here's the deal: 20 or 30 years ago, 90% of the musicians in the US ONLY played live gigs and seldom (if ever) recorded other than cassettes at live gigs.
These days, it seems like 90% of the musicians ONLY record and seldom (if ever) actually play live in front of a paying audience. It seems to me that the quality of both live gigs and commercially released recordings are suffering - does anyone else see a correlation?

I think you're off by 10 or 15 years . . . change that "20 or 30 years ago" to "30 or 40 years ago" and I'll agree 100% with ya'.

And yeah, I DO see a correlation, but I think that there are some other factors that enter into the equation, too.

I'd like to say that the CD's AND the live shows of the top-grossing artists DON'T reflect what you're talking about . . . but the lower-end local stuff sure DO (suck, that is).

There's so much emphasis on "marketing" these days that I think most people don't really "hear" (or "feel") the MUSIC. IMO. YMMV.

And what ever happened to the idea of having some "live" experience BEFORE your first recording sessions?.

[JimmyM]

I don't see the correlation because recording should improve your musicianship by listening to what you recorded and making improvements on it. The main problem with the quality of music suffering is record companies' impatience with letting an act develop over the course of a few albums and expecting them to have major hits right out of the gate or they get dropped. That and the fact they only sign acts with huge money behind them regardless of the quality. I think it has zero to do with recording or live performance, and everything to do with signing bands based on their deep pockets.

[diechris]

not that i like the band much... but they practice a couple doors down... the band Panic at the Disco played ZERO live shows before landing a record deal and doing a big US tour... promotion is much easier nowdays.. before it seems like bands needed to tour and play shows just to get people to hear about them.. now we have the internet among other things...

with that said.. its easier for bands to do good recordings and make big money before even playing... now... on the other hand... when you DO tour... if you cant back it you'll be forgotten FAST.

[jwl]

Originally Posted by diechris

not that i like the band much... but they practice a couple doors down... the band Panic at the Disco played ZERO live shows before landing a record deal and doing a big US tour... promotion is much easier nowdays.. before it seems like bands needed to tour and play shows just to get people to hear about them.. now we have the internet among other things...

with that said.. its easier for bands to do good recordings and make big money before even playing... now... on the other hand... when you DO tour... if you cant back it you'll be forgotten FAST.

+1

[Dave Martin]

Originally Posted by deaf pea

I think you're off by 10 or 15 years . . . change that "20 or 30 years ago" to "30 or 40 years ago" and I'll agree 100% with ya'.

Well, I was playing professionally 30 years ago, and it was certainly that way, but even 20 years ago, musicians primarily played music for people. Today, they seem to primarily work in someone's home studio.

[Dave Martin]

Originally Posted by diechris

its easier for bands to do good recordings and make big money before even playing...

An interesting conjecture - where can I hear good recordings from these non-performing bands? Certainly I've had little luck listening to bands on myspace or the local alternative radio station. The other half of your statement is interesting as well - how are you defining 'big money', and who's making it without playing? (OK, to start, I know of some musicians who have had their songs placed in movies and on TV, but nothing that I've personally heard about exceeds around $10K for an unknown band.)

And I know of no 'new' acts who are making big money on their first tour.

[msquared]

People don't go out as much to see live music now as they did 30 or 40 years ago because there is so much more entertainment available at home. Cable TV, Internet, and (to a small extent) more access to recorded music from nonlabel and indie label bands have simply made people not go out as much. Why try to gig six nights a week all over your region if you're barely going to cover gas costs?

Recording at home is just happening a lot because it's cheap as hell to do it. It has nothing to do with the time period. Musicians have been buying four tracks and doing home recording for as long as it's been affordable.

Jetpackbassist, you're right about the revolution, you're just wrong about the time frame. It's been happening for years now, and it's been caused by both of the above.

[deaf pea]

Originally Posted by Dave Martin

Well, I was playing professionally 30 years ago, and it was certainly that way, but even 20 years ago, musicians primarily played music for people.

Well, 30 years ago I had already been a professional, union musician for 17 years! And I DO remember when "Live Music is BEST!" was the union's slogan . . . I also remember how that started to change in the early '80's with the new popularity of midi-sequencing and records that only had a keyboard player (doing ALL of the music), maybe a guitar player, and, of course, the singer (or singers).

Originally Posted by Dave Martin

Today, they seem to primarily work in someone's home studio.

Yeah, you got THAT right . . . "professional" musicians that have NEVER played in public . . .

Originally Posted by Dave Martin

An interesting conjecture - where can I hear good recordings from these non-performing bands? Certainly I've had little luck listening to bands on myspace or the local alternative radio station. The other half of your statement is interesting as well - how are you defining 'big money', and who's making it without playing? (OK, to start, I know of some musicians who have had their songs placed in movies and on TV, but nothing that I've personally heard about exceeds around $10K for an unknown band.)And I know of no 'new' acts who are making big money on their first tour.

ALSO correct . . . I'm really with you on this . . . are we just too old, worn out and out-of-touch? . . . I don't think so . . . BTW, my work as a recording engineer (and fretless bassist on one song) won another Grammy and two more Latin Grammys this year. Out-of-touch? I don't think so . . .

Originally Posted by msquared

People don't go out as much to see live music now as they did 30 or 40 years ago because there is so much more entertainment available at home...Recording at home is just happening a lot because it's cheap as hell to do it.
Jetpackbassist, you're right about the revolution, you're just wrong about the time frame. It's been happening for years now, and it's been caused by both of the above.

I gotta agree with you on those reasons for the changes in the biz . . .

[jwl]

Originally Posted by Dave Martin

Reading through the posts in this forum reminded me of something that we discussed last week in the theater where I was working...

Here's the deal: 20 or 30 years ago, 90% of the musicians in the US ONLY played live gigs and seldom (if ever) recorded other than cassettes at live gigs.
These days, it seems like 90% of the musicians ONLY record and seldom (if ever) actually play live in front of a paying audience. It seems to me that the quality of both live gigs and commercially released recordings are suffering - does anyone else see a correlation?

i don't think music could ever be played too much or too soon.

[sublime0bass]

my only input into this is that the Greatful Dead made some of the worst studio albums ever EVER.

however, if one were lucky enough to see a live show...

[DocBop]

Originally Posted by Dave Martin

Reading through the posts in this forum reminded me of something that we discussed last week in the theater where I was working...

Here's the deal: 20 or 30 years ago, 90% of the musicians in the US ONLY played live gigs and seldom (if ever) recorded other than cassettes at live gigs.
These days, it seems like 90% of the musicians ONLY record and seldom (if ever) actually play live in front of a paying audience. It seems to me that the quality of both live gigs and commercially released recordings are suffering - does anyone else see a correlation?

I agree for the most part. I think people would play more it there was the places to play. When I came up there was live music for the piano or piano and bass at the corner bar, to small clubs everywhere with everything Country, Rock, RB, Jazz. Both covers and origianls. I remember little clubs in Hollywood like Sea Witch and Gazzarri's and seeing Doors, Buffalo Springfield thru Van Halen working five nights a week. See bands come in pretty raw and develop their sound. I remember going to hang out and listen this hot bass player Lee Sklar in a band call Wolfgang. Bands and audiences have raised prices to point low priced D.J's started getting the gig's instead. Even concerts back then plentiful and biggest decision was who to not see weach week. Ticket prices were reasonable because a concert was to go hear the music, not see a big expensive production. Again audience demands priced plentiful concerts to being a thing of the past. There were jams going on everywhere during day, at clubs, after hours hangouts. I remember the summer I and many of my friends grew so much musically because we would jam daily. Our jams became known to others and other musicians would fall by and we would all benefit for playing with new people. Then bands start killing jams because they HAD to play so loud neighbors would take it at any hour. Nowadays so many musicians would even play if money isn't involved. Jamming is too big a hassle to bring gear and just play. What is with that???

So IMO playing with other is a necessity to learn and grow as a musician. Now on the other side having inexpensive recording gear is great for practicing. Some are learning more about music and how things fit together being able to record cheaply. More are getting a chance to record, but the music IMO doesn't have the interaction and feel to pre-inexpensive recording days. Look at so many albums today are a producer who plays most the instruments and the singer(s). That stuff to me gets too formula real fast only a couple exception like Prince. No we need rhythm sections to track together.

Bottom line for me is we need balance. We need more places of musicians to play to learn to interact and groove. At same time use the recording gear as a learning tool and enabling more to get their music out to the world to hear. It's all about Balance to me.

[robboy]

I had a Music Biz prof. that used to say that the first recording of music was the beginning of the demise of live performance. He believed that your recording is your performance. He felt that due to the proliferation of Multi Media, people wouldn't have to leave home to hear music.I used to think to myself that he was wrong or misinformed but now I'm not so sure he wasn't right.
First, there are not as many places to play as there were in the 60's and 70's. Back then(ok I'm and old fart), I used to work as much as I wanted, 5 or 6 nights a week was the norm. There were many venues to play and almost all of them had live music. This is how you learn to play. You can practice all you want but if you don't get out there and bang it out night after night, you can't build them chops. Not true in my area today. Fewer venues and more players.
Second, the pool of players is much larger than it was 30 years ago. I can remember when my list of bassists was pretty short. Not so today. I've lived and worked in this area a long time and it seems like everyday I meet another new player. More players less chances to play.
Third, maybe because of the above mentioned glut of players, a lot of people just can't play. I hear bands all the time that have bass/drum combinations that just don't groove. The audience doesn't always know that the band's not grooving but they feel that something is wrong.
Finally, most of the bands feel that they have to have a CD or they really aren't a band. So they go to a studio that will make them sound better, for very little money, than they really are. They make recording that doesn't really represent them live and nobody seems to notice or care. 30 years ago studio time was expensive and you pretty much had to go a big studio to record. It was a major deal. I used to repair gear in LA and all of the rooms in town were around 250.00 an hour and usually paid for by the record company. The project studio hadn't happened yet. So naturally at those rates if you couldn't play you weren't going be recording.
I guess I've sorta rambled on here but I think that Dave is right. It would be nice if people learned to play before they recorded, but with the advent of Auto Tune, Drumagog, and quick and easy editing it's probably not going to happen.

[IB3K]

Well having left being a session musician in the 80's to become an investment banker to make a living and then coming back to being a session musician(and part time teacher) in the past five years, there are basic reasons why you see this. And I actually see low-ish quality recordings done early on as a very good thing for musicians. After all what's the point of spending thousands on music that is saved from the console and then ripped to mp3's and put on an ipod (I see this done all the time). Ultimately super cheap and abundant recorded music is very bad for record companies and those that can't play live but good for the musicians that can play live. It's just a question of how we (musicians) work the transition over the next 10-15 years as to how it will come out for us. I contend that selling music as tables and chairs (ie CD's and vinyl) has never been all that great for musicians. After all, at the very least, to have a long career it's always HAD to have been a better deal for the record company than the musician, which is why I started doing something else.

In old media (aka mass media) content was difficult to create but once you made it, marketed it, and distributed it, consumers were pretty easy to come by because the lack of content created its own demand. It mattered much less if you were actually talented, than how you were produced, marketed, and distributed as an artist. This is a perfect situation if you are a record company because the expensive stuff is production, promotion, and distribution, which has a lot more to with money than music. Looking at it another way, think of attention as a commodity. In mass media days attention was fairly abundant provided you could get something decent out to the end user, a newspaper, or CD, or even live performance and promote it well. This is bad for bands because bands could only play in so many places and situations, for example a band can't play in 10,000 cars at the same time. Again perfect for a record company. To an economist you could say after a certain threshold, attention becomes abundant (which means cheap to an economist), and so for every person that actually buys a CD the overall cost you paid, in studio time and promotions, to get your chunk of attention, the overall price goes down. So it paid to put money in production, but especially into promotion, and distribution.

With New Media, we fight for the same attention, only with New Media investing in the same sort of infrastructure becomes a bad investment. You can buy a bigger and better studio and print more copies, promote the heck out of it, but the people on the street are too distracted by the thousands of other content providers to notice you. So old media is like a soup line where you have not much soup to begin with, and even when you get some soup, you can only choose between two or three pots. New Media is like a 2 mile long salad bar, where you have so much stuff that you aren't ever really sure if there's actually any ranch dressing in there, and even if there is you may have to walk a mile to find it. That's why Google is worth so much money, because they help you find the ranch dressing you like. Now a natural result of all this content (excess supply) is hyper deflation for finished content, again very bad for record companies, newspapers, etc. But not necessarily bad for the artist, because artists are not tied only to producing finished recordings, but because of hyper deflation on finished recordings those that are tied only to finished recordings probably will have a much harder time making money. Apple figured this out a while ago which is why the most successful "record company" today is actually a hardware/software company. They sort through things and help create a communities, which gets people to their site and hence gets a chunk of people's attention. So they don't market the artists, rather they market the communities. It's why they market "Rip, mix, burn." and not XYZ artist like traditional media.

Well anyway, I guess that's enough of an economics lesson for the day.

[pretaanluxis]

Originally Posted by diechris

promotion is much easier nowdays.. before it seems like bands needed to tour and play shows just to get people to hear about them.. now we have the internet among other things...

when you DO tour... if you cant back it you'll be forgotten FAST.

Originally Posted by msquared

People don't go out as much to see live music now as they did 30 or 40 years ago because there is so much more entertainment available at home.

Recording at home is just happening a lot because it's cheap as hell to do it. It has nothing to do with the time period.

I think these are the real reasons young bands are recording more and touring less. It is just easier to do and you get a larger audience, faster. But of course things are the other way around for mature band, because people already know them and come out to shows, but don't buy albums, live is where they make all their money.

[Dave Martin]

Originally Posted by pretaanluxis

I think these are the real reasons young bands are recording more and touring less. It is just easier to do and you get a larger audience, faster.

A larger audience? Really? I won't disagree that there's a larger 'potential' audience, but having 1000 myspace friends doesn't really help you to put butts in the seats when you play, does it? And I don't see much evidence that they'll buy your records, either. Or perhaps I'm mis-reading your post - can you explain in more detail what you mean by 'larger audience', and how that will help the band?