The electronic music scene has always had lots of very unusual and interesting business models going on, right back to the late 80s. People in the early rave scene in london were doing stuff in the early 90s that looks modern today.
Consider the idea that there have always been some records out there that DJs consider too good to even play, except at very particular and infrequent times and places. There are artists who keep their identities and even their music and their entire existence secret at the behest of their label manager. This is not just artistic preciousness, it is a key part of a very well-tested business model. There is lots of music out there that is too good to be released, if every guy on the street had a copy it would devalue it and hasten its passing into unfashionability.
It's more than just controlling supply (although thats a lot of it,) its about making the people that have managed/been allowed to hear the mythical secret tunes feel special, part of a lucky few. They are in a sense indebted to the DJ, even though they paid to go and see them perform.
They will tell all their friends, "and then halfway through Blackdown's set he drew for these unlabelled CDRs, it was too much. I've never heard anything like it. I asked him who it was and he wouldn't tell me." They will then post the same thing on message boards, asking if anyone else knew who the tunes were by. Many times, I have paid to go and see a person play just because I know they have access to tunes that nobody else does. That could be the only time I ever get a chance to hear those tunes. That could be the only time those tunes are ever played.
I plan to write some blog posts about this stuff at some point.
I've experienced this a lot while going to Dubstep parties, there are a lot of DJs that indeed have those special ocassion records laying around.
First party I went to a DJ called Skream played a track, later I found out it's one that he would never release and has a bit of a legendary status on the boards etc surrounding Dubstep. It was indeed amazing to experience it.
It pains me that I will likely never get to own this record. However I have already paid to go and see someone who played it, and this was certainly part of my decision to do so. They've probably made more money off me from that than they would have if I bought the flac.
EDIT: research shows that this track is now in fact coming out. Rave music has two solutions to the problem of unclearable samples: the classic, unlabelled vinyl sold direct to shops out the back of a car, and the more modern free download leaked to twitter. The former is dying out unfortunately.
"However I have already paid to go and see someone who played it, and this was certainly part of my decision to do so. They've probably made more money off me from that than they would have if I bought the flac."
Who's the "they" there? The DJ who played the track or the artist who produced it? Sometimes it seems that in electronic music DJs get more attention/credit/$ than the artists who made the tracks being played. (although I know some DJs are also producers as well, I think they're the exception to the rule)
Could be both, often it would be a DJ who is on the same label or part of the same crew as the producer who wrote the tracks. Often these people share studios, so there is a direct monetary link there.
There are almost no DJs who aren't producers. The few that are only DJs either have some special and unique facet to their style of mixing, or they date back to the early days when Things were Different.
This may be partly due to the infamous "dubplate culture" intrinsic to the Drum n' Bass scene, and later the Dubstep scene. Back in the late 90s it wasn't uncommon for certain gigantic tracks to exist as exclusive dubplates given to only top-name DJs for a couple of years before their eventual release... tracks like Bad Company's "The Nine" being a prime example (Prototype was a label notorious for this kind of hype-building tactic).
These days, the tools and techniques of DJing have been largely demystified, so DJs and producers trade in a currency of unreleased tracks, otherwise there's precious little to differentiate their sets from those played by any number of technically qualified local DJs.
I was lucky enough to have a few house records published in the 80's and 90's. An initial run of a record would always include a few hand-labeled "test pressings" that we would take around to radio and club dj's to see how they would fare in the mix - and also to build the buzz.
It was always a rush, going to a full club or hot radio station and handing "fresh wax" to the dj - no it was not really wax - and getting immediate feedback. Very similar to launching a new app or feature these days!
I know Aphex Twin was notorious for this and he even got to a point where anything released was run of the mill, middle of the road, remix stuff and was even entitled "26 mixes for cash".
I'd argue that some of Aphex Twin's best tracks were remixes he did for other artists, which later appeared on that career-spanning compilation. While it's arguable whether or not some of those remixes contained original source material from the tracks they are supposed to be remixes of, I think it's disingenuous to refer to that stuff as run of the mill.
I specifically pre-ordered that album not because it contained to chocolate Aphex Twin coins, but because it was way better than tracking down the dozens of singles that contained those remixes.
Similar to the story about how DJ Kool Herc* discovered "Apache" (in the Michael Viner cover version http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_6UEtFuDHY ) and adopted it as his secret weapon, managing to hide its identity for quite a while.
* Or was it Grandmaster Flash? I wish I could find the TV documentary I remember this from.
For what it's worth I lived in LA for several years after graduating college. Dispite playing in bands and being knee deep in the music industry I found that almost all of the new music I was introduced to as being "great" really sucked, notwithstanding the awesome stuff my late 20's roommate had on his CD rack. This was about 9 years ago.
Fast forward to today, and I've found more great DJs and bands based in Seattle in the past 4 months than I did the entire two years I lived in LA. And the 4 months before that, and the 4 months before that. And this is dwarfed by all the great music new being made all around the world.
I find most of my music through fliers, last.fm friends, hyperlocal news and forums dedicated to particular subgenres. We're so much better networked than we were a decade ago that not being amazed at what is being made (and what has been made under your nose) shows a lack of being hooked into that network, not that great art isn't being made today.
It's easy to mourn the death of an industry. Some really great people were involved in making and promoting some really great things. But it's silly to expect the death of art. The kids are alright.
Interesting to note that his strategy for musicians to differentiate themselves from the Million-man race to the bottom in music is so close to the strategy you need to differentiate yourself from the Million-rentacoder race to the bottom in software consulting:
Differentiate yourself by being better, not by being cheaper or willing to bend over further than the next guy.
There's always a place in any market for really good stuff at a premium price. Slot yourself firmly in to that position, and you have a lot better shot.
This piece speaks of the democratization of the access to electronic music, but fails to properly address the democratization of its production. It is mentioned, but there is no suggestion that it may affect the sales average per producer.
Its basic supply/demand imho : internet brings perhaps a tenfold increase in electro demand, but also a hundredfold (or more if you count in the likes of http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/) increase in production.
There is also that, while demand rose, I don't believe that the core group that would buy the music if they couldn't get it for free augmented that much. Those are typically the people who pay for vinyls and for live performance nowadays.
I posted a comment on this page when it was originally published, pointing out that his analogy to political science misses the mark - it's not democratization, it's full on marxism. The means of production (and distribution) have rather suddenly become accessible to the workers.
This guy's rant is just another example of someone in the traditional music industry not quite getting it.
That's not really what Marxism is about. Marxism is about the workers taking over the one big factory from its owners, not about someone inventing an efficient cheap small-scale factory so that all the workers go home and become small businessmen.
Democratisation isn't really the right word either, of course. It's more like the Industrial Revolution in reverse -- increasing technology shifts production back from huge centralized facilities to one-man operations.
Indeed, it suggests something very core to entrepreneurship - the good money is always in new places, not existing ones. Oneupmanship in an existing field always turns into a game of capital and manpower, bigger risks for less reward. But "breaking out of the box" and finding that new place can be a really tough thing too.
Thanks for the article. This brought back memories for me of learning and making electronic music in the college lab back in the 80s -- analog gear on reel tape, and later digital + MIDI.
It requires some real dedication at this to make a living, and I wish the practitioners the best. I live in the sticks, so I don't think I'll be catching many performances (plus the family vs concert attendance). However, I think the download services (e.g. - Amazon, iTunes) do have something to offer if you can get hooked up, and get word of mouth support from friends of friends.
Interesting article, but I definitely do believe that it is a bit muddled and oblivious. Yes, you should not study Ricardo Villalobos as a template to emulate any more than you would for Mozart -- if you like that music, you digest it and enjoy it and then create something that is intrinsically yours; how could you genuinely just want to produce something that is exactly someone else's vision and aesthetic? I am a bit skeptical of the author's potential embedded assumptions about what ought to spur and what currently does enable music composition as a full-time career path.
My biggest issue with that article is how much weight it seems to place on the "lucky idiot" theory: why assume that the cycle of the guy who 'makes it' for a few weeks of popularity and then abandoned for the next hot thing actually implies anything general about "making it" in electronic music? I don't want to jump to conclusions, but I detect a hint of an entitlement complex there -- namely that if one wishes to be a musician badly enough and works hard enough at it with enough genuine passion and self honesty, that person deserves a career. That's ridiculous. Those qualities are always important, but being a working artist of any kind requires an audience--that's not just an afterthought that's tacked on after the fact or something which can be separated from the production process itself, but something that's embedded into the whole creative process.
If you are not able to discover a desire to experience something that a large group of people express and are not able to find, why should you get any money or indeed any indication for you to continue your current strategy of earning a living by producing art? You can't ever just jump on a bandwagon and ignore your own individual vision, but you need to balance it with an ability to connect with supply and demand forces of a market if you want to making a living out of it. You can complain all you want about the imperfections of the current system (it has its warts), but shouldn't you be focusing more on continuing to develop an audience whose desires align with your creative vision, and just generally experimenting with the understanding that some experiments fail? I don't understand how anyone can ever feel entitled to being an artist as a stable, full time job without the risks, hard work and inevitable rejection that must be dealt with along the way.
Further thought about the "lucky idiot" idea: of course fashion trends exist and have their girth, but the cultures connected to various strains of art (along with their surrounding environment) are always a more meaningful lens to look through. Of course, I am looking at this through the eyes of someone who loves composing, mixing, experiencing and thinking about the nature of electronic dance music while simultaneously being skeptical about committing to making it a full time job. It's certainly possible, but it's not guaranteed--there's a lot of competition and a tough market, which requires a decent exit strategy if one tries and fails at it. I know some talented musicians who do not have trouble making music their day job, but they 1) are talented, 2)understand and have experience with the reality of being a performing artist, and 3)have a direct connection and investment in their audience. The last bit is the most important part for me -- the direct connection part. I am not sure if I will ever want to make music my day job, but it is an important part of my life, so I invest a lot of care into it--I've got to say, the environment for making electronic music nowadays with just ONE site (Soundcloud) is wonderful.
For what it's worth, I really love Soundcloud. As a programmer, I really have to admire how minimalistic and useful its design is as well as how it well it implements the freemium model. The free account is usable, but the premium levels are worth their costs, enough for me to actually have one because of the value it provides to me. That's pretty cool. As an artist, It's probably the web application that has helped my artistic endeavors the most in a way that I really don't think would be so possible without. It has succeeded in creating an application that connects an enormous community of musicians with each other through as directly as possible: the music. It's really cool to observe how it has actually made a geographic space from the virtual space of the signal trace of an audio clip -- when you comment on a track, you can make either a general comment or a timed comment. For a timed comment, a blip appears over the point in time in the track that you're making the comment over, so anyone who subsequently listens to that track can experience not just the music as it plays back in real time, but what other people have said about certain parts of it, as those parts come up when you listen to it. For someone who creates music, this opens up the way you and your social network connect to music. If someone starts following you, you can immediately grasp some of the music they've written and the responses they've got and vice versa. If there's a producer you really dig, you can muster up the courage to send them a track of yours and ask for their feedback -- I've done that lately, and I've been amazed that they even respond at all. They're producers that have enormous followings and are already really successful, but they can still find the time to listen to a track I wrote and give me feedback.
To witness a producer you respect and admire give you positive feedback about a track you wrote is a pretty incredible and deeply validating feeling; that kind of feeling is the kind that motivates you to keep working on your music and keep going on it despite how challenging it is. It's also independent of your ability to turn it into a profession. I dunno, but that throughout the article, I never got the impression that the author's analysis was aware of that whole evolutionary process of creating music, connecting to others who create music and giving/receiving feedback that I experience/am in awe of with my soundcloud.
(http://soundcloud.com/airlab-am if you're curious--I feel weird about plugs but I think it makes sense in this case so you can contextualize how I am responding to this article's description of the music making process relative to
my music own music)
Goodness. That's a really long wall of text. I hope someone enjoys it. I'm glad that this kind of thread can come up on hackernews and get this kind of a lively discussion though!
Bravo! Well said, all around. The world is changing in so many ways. Those of us who work day-in and day-out in technology are probably among the most aware of how if you don't adapt, you can very quickly fall behind while the rest of the world moves past you. But your post touches on a lot of other points the guy made, and how they're kind of ... not quite right. Anyway, thanks for the wall of text. Good read - better than the original blog post even.
The same can be said for 99cent apps. The access to sales channel has been democratized and this creates a massive inventory of software. Some of which are very good, but still forced to price at a very low level. A piece of software like iPad's GarageBand at 5.99 - who could have believed this?
I used plugins and Cubase for years, then I bought the greatest analogue synth ever (Oberheim Xpander) for a fortune - noting that it's gone up in value - and then in 2009 I bought some mixing desks, 2 samplers, and a 24-bit, 96k Emu soundcard for mastering. The basic idea was, if everyone else is doing it with plugins, I'll make it sound different by using analogue gear everyone is throwing out cheap on Ebay.
Techno was in a big way about cheap synths in thrift shops, and I think it's coming full circle: mixers and samplers are the new wave.
Looking at the "Closer to what today’s typical studio looks like" picture, it appears this setup is sans speakers, and I don't think the two Apple Macs compensate for this...
He writes an enormous quantity of harrowingly insane music and Mike P from Planet Mu releases it all. And he has a good agent. It seems to work. Even if it does occasionally involve imagining that he's a pigeon on top of the hungarian national opera house.
Proof that good electronic music with artful classical influences gets zero attention is that this comment would be at the bottom of the page with a sub-zero rating.
http://soundcloud.com/alxander/cravings
Proof that there is no such thing as bad publicity is that parent comment managed to differentiate itself and draw attention to its core content by leveraging, intentional or not, a sub-zero rating.
I'd like to point out that the initial comment said something along the lines of hi I'm part of the computer science community and I make unconventional sounds you might like. I only changed it after it was ostracized to reflect the reality of our disconnection.
Let's start with that I didn't downvote the comment you've now changed that one into. I downvoted something else and I think it's at least a bad tone to liberally edit comments.
Second, the original comment said nothing about you being part of the community. It looked like poor self-promotion of some musical piece I didn't find interesting, let alone unique or "unconventional".
I don't really understand what kind of "disconnection" you are trying prove. In any case, please don't vandalize others' votes.
Consider the idea that there have always been some records out there that DJs consider too good to even play, except at very particular and infrequent times and places. There are artists who keep their identities and even their music and their entire existence secret at the behest of their label manager. This is not just artistic preciousness, it is a key part of a very well-tested business model. There is lots of music out there that is too good to be released, if every guy on the street had a copy it would devalue it and hasten its passing into unfashionability.
It's more than just controlling supply (although thats a lot of it,) its about making the people that have managed/been allowed to hear the mythical secret tunes feel special, part of a lucky few. They are in a sense indebted to the DJ, even though they paid to go and see them perform.
They will tell all their friends, "and then halfway through Blackdown's set he drew for these unlabelled CDRs, it was too much. I've never heard anything like it. I asked him who it was and he wouldn't tell me." They will then post the same thing on message boards, asking if anyone else knew who the tunes were by. Many times, I have paid to go and see a person play just because I know they have access to tunes that nobody else does. That could be the only time I ever get a chance to hear those tunes. That could be the only time those tunes are ever played.
I plan to write some blog posts about this stuff at some point.