Democracy of Creation
I'd like to share a quick story: a few months ago, I wrote on here about musicians on the street. I suspected that they didn't need to wait to be discovered. The ones that really wanted to, I figured, would be able to get their hands on a computer, a mic, and some software that would let them start making music (no record company needed) and that MySpace pages were sufficient to give fans a starting point for finding them online.
I decided to try and help, so I went out and bought a copy of ProTools and a microphone and hit the streets. I started asking the people that I saw playing guitar or bongos on the street if they wanted any help being recorded. I told them that I wasn't a professional audio engineer, but I had software and I wanted to learn how to use it better. The learning, I felt, would come best if I were on the hook to help someone (other than myself) try and capture their vision in sound. I was interested in doing it for free...charging for something that was effectively a commodity didn't make much sense to me.
It's six months later and I haven't found any takers. A lot of the people I approached, to my surprise, reached down into the bags they carried with them and pulled out a MacBook. "I record on this," they would tell me, and go on to explain how they used the laptop's built-in microphone with GarageBand (the recording program that comes pre-installed on Macs) to create MP3s. Those that didn't have computers usually told me that they had a friend, or friend of a friend, who had a home studio and they would use that occasionally.
Let me repeat that last part, in case you missed it: several people living on the streets have their own computers they carry with them, which they use to produce music. Maybe I'm a little late in arriving at this particular party, but I'm old enough to remember a time when this wasn't possible, so it still comes as a surprise to me. That fact that the tools needed to produce, to create, and to distribute are now in the hands of people who don't have a place to live.
A lot of people realize this has gotten easier, but I don't think most people (myself included) really understand the severity of it. And I'm interested to see where that leads the state of music in the next ten to twenty years.
I decided to try and help, so I went out and bought a copy of ProTools and a microphone and hit the streets. I started asking the people that I saw playing guitar or bongos on the street if they wanted any help being recorded. I told them that I wasn't a professional audio engineer, but I had software and I wanted to learn how to use it better. The learning, I felt, would come best if I were on the hook to help someone (other than myself) try and capture their vision in sound. I was interested in doing it for free...charging for something that was effectively a commodity didn't make much sense to me.
It's six months later and I haven't found any takers. A lot of the people I approached, to my surprise, reached down into the bags they carried with them and pulled out a MacBook. "I record on this," they would tell me, and go on to explain how they used the laptop's built-in microphone with GarageBand (the recording program that comes pre-installed on Macs) to create MP3s. Those that didn't have computers usually told me that they had a friend, or friend of a friend, who had a home studio and they would use that occasionally.
Let me repeat that last part, in case you missed it: several people living on the streets have their own computers they carry with them, which they use to produce music. Maybe I'm a little late in arriving at this particular party, but I'm old enough to remember a time when this wasn't possible, so it still comes as a surprise to me. That fact that the tools needed to produce, to create, and to distribute are now in the hands of people who don't have a place to live.
A lot of people realize this has gotten easier, but I don't think most people (myself included) really understand the severity of it. And I'm interested to see where that leads the state of music in the next ten to twenty years.