Creative Caffeine: Nashville Recording Studio

Originally I was excited to attend the music production lecture given by Darrin Vincent, long time Ricky Skaggs bandmate and member of IBMA winning group Dailey and Vincent. I want to be clear that Darrin is extremely talented as producer, musician, and an artist. Dailey and Vincent are very deserving of their recent awards.

Darrin made alot of good points against basement and bedroom studio recording, but I quickly became disapointed when he began talking recording formats.  He talked about how important they are and proceeded to list them… pro tools, nuendo, radar, etc… everything was mentioned but analog tape.  This is very surprising in the bluegrass genre and I immediately spoke up… “what about analog?”  He dismissed the notion like it was a long gone thing of the past and quickly moved on. Very disapointing!

This is very puzzling to me, being that Darrin’s longtime former band leader Ricky Skaggs records to analog tape.  Ricky, unpleased with the sound of digital recording, quit using certain Nashville studios when they switched to digital in the 90’s.  Ricky’s own studio now records to a 16 track analog machine and trasnfers into iZ Radar.

Darrin then spoke of producing the Cherryholmes band.  He mentioned that at times Jere Cherryholmes was not satisfied with the sound, asking why it didn’t sound like Ricky Skaggs’ album he brought in as a reference. Darrin explained that without the expensive guitars and such, it simply could not sound the same… which I suspect is only partially true.

Obviously it’s going to be hard to sound anywhere near as good as Cody Kilby,  but… considering that Ricky’s album would have been tracked to tape, this may have been much more of a factor that an inferior guitar.  Although I have been unsuccessful at finding out what recorder was actually used and I regret not asking Darrin at the time, I would guess that Jere Cherryholmes was missing that extra magic tape can add to your tracks… especially acoustic bluegrass tracks.  He was missing the warm tone and smooth dynamics that properly driven tape can give… not to mention the overall blend of instruments.

Contrary to popular belief,  tape is still available and some studios are still using it frequently and understand the benefits.  Combined with the new tools digital has given us creates one of the most powerful set of tools engineers have ever had.  Track in analog and mix in Pro Tools… The best of both worlds!  The difference is worth it.  Shocking in the bluegrass world to find a bass player who dismisses analog in front of a room of bluegrass industry professionals.

It’s been a depressing summer for the delusional record industry. We’re seeing a total disconnect between labels’ unrealistic, old-school revenue expectations and what the market can bear. On the streaming-music front, the sad reality is that advertising revenue may never fully support the music industry wishful-thinking profit margins.

Full Article:
How the Music Business Spent the Summer Killing Itself - Advertising Age - The Media Guy

Slipknot vocalist and frontman Corey Taylor says it’s time for the music industry to stop taking legal action against downloaders. He feels it is the labels themselves who are to blame for online piracy, since the quality of released music is so bad, no-one wants to buy it.

Full Article:
Slipknot Frontman Says Labels Cause Piracy | TorrentFreak

 While the niche may still be small measured against overall sales of recorded music, the surge of interest in vinyl — and, particularly, its rising cachet among young listeners — is providing a rare glimmer of hope in a hemorrhaging industry.

“Even if the industry doesn’t do all that well going forward, we could really carve this out to be a nice profitable niche,” said Bill Gagnon, a senior vice president at EMI Catalog Marketing, who is in charge of vinyl releases. He said that people who buy vinyl nowadays are charmed by the format’s earthy authenticity.

Link to Article:

Digg - Another Spin for Vinyl Records

Online music sales continue to skyrocket at the expense of CDs. iTunes continues to be the leader of the pack, too, not only in online sales, but music sales overall. But a small rebellion is brewing against iTunes as artists become disgruntled with the hit they’re taking on overall album sales thanks to the now-wildly-popular method of cherry-picking favorite tracks for download.

Full Article:

Album-loving artists blame iTunes for changed music tastes

Another birthday for the CD has come and gone and yet the damn things just won’t die. On Aug. 17th, 1982, the Compact Disc was born into an age of rampant consumerism that was the 1980s. Big hair was in, big vinyl and the big snarls of tape from cassettes was out.

Full Article:
CD Turns 26 and It Still Won’t Die | Maximum PC

July has been a busy month for transferring old recordings to Pro Tools.  The sooner the better with these old tapes… if you wait too long they have to be baked due to excessive oxide shedding.  Creative Caffeine is one of the few studios setup to transfer 24 track analog tapes straight into Pro Tools HD with pristine Apogee converters.

Early this month John Mills transferred a number of 24 track tapes to Pro Tools for the highly respected John Anderson.  Chief engineer Collin Peterson has been working with Dave Shipley to transfer recordings for the Del McCoury Band, some of which may be featured on an upcoming release,  as well has some early recordings from John Hartford,  some of which featuring the Aereoplane band with Tut Taylor, Norman Blake, and Randy Scruggs!  Most of the McCoury tapes were 16 track 2″ recorded at Ricky Skaggs’ studio in Hendersonville. We were able to rent a 16 track head for our JH-24 and make that option available to clients at an extra charge.

The music industry is suffering, and it’s all because of those darn fans. Er, what? It turns out that KISS member Gene Simmons believes exactly that. He claims that piracy is to blame for the industry’s woes, and KISS is apparently taking its ball and going home until the situation gets under control.

“The record industry is dead. It’s six feet underground and unfortunately the fans have done this,” Simmons said, according to AOL News. “They’ve decided to download and file share. There is no record industry around so we’re going to wait until everybody settles down and becomes civilized. As soon as the record industry pops its head up we’ll record new material.”

It’s never a smart move to blame your loyal and devoted fans for the injustices of the world, but Simmons seems to think that his fans (unlike everyone else’s) would rather steal from the band than continue paying for music they enjoy. Simmons also thinks bands that encourage the public to download their music for free (such as Radiohead with its famed In Rainbows experiment) are only making the situation worse, despite the fact that Radiohead has made a nice chunk of change from the In Rainbows release so far.

Simmons’ latest comments come just over six months after his previous rant about the music industry, wherein he told Billboard, “Every little college kid, every freshly-scrubbed little kid’s face should have been sued off the face of the earth.” At that time, he blamed the record industry for letting foxes into the henhouse (presumably by allowing DRM-free music to be sold online, or perhaps any music at all to be sold online). “Doesn’t affect me. But imagine being a new band with dreams of getting on stage and putting out your own record. Forget it,” he said.

So, does this apparently rampant piracy problem affect Simmons or not? His comments between last November and now seem to contradict each other a bit, although they clearly share the same underlying sentiment: anger. Simmons might want to reconsider speaking for anyone but himself, though. Many young and independent bands are able to enjoy success on and off the stage, all while selling their music online. As part of an upcoming feature we’re doing on indie bands and online music, one band told us that its members believe that P2P is all part of the ecosystem, and that they even saw increased sales after their album showed up on Bit Torrent.

The sad part is that Simmons’ continued comments aren’t going to cause anyone (fans or not) to have an epiphany and quit their P2P-slingin’ ways. In fact, it may have the opposite effect—the clear disdain in his words may well drive some of KISS’ fans away. The only thing Simmons is doing by lashing out at fans is earning him a reputation as a curmudgeonly artist unwilling to adapt to a changing music landscape.

Original Article:
Gene Simmons blames fans, P2P for killing music industry

Sony BMG plans to join the crowded pool of digital music services by launching its own music subscription service… sometime. Sony BMG CEO Rolf Schmidt-Holtz said that the service would allow customers unlimited access to Sony BMG’s entire library for a fee of €6 to €8 per month (roughly US$9-$12) and that the company was working with other labels and gadget makers in order to make it more appealing.

link to full article:
Sony BMG’s planned music service looks like a yawner

For instant rumor action, combine “Apple” with just about anything, add water, shake, and serve up on the Internet. The power of Apple rumors was on display again this week as word of a listen-till-your-eardrums-burst subscription hit the news. The result was a virtual torrent of commentary, news reporting, punditry, and antitrust accusations; PR on the scale that most companies would kill to have.

The hype

It began with an article in the Financial Times that said Apple was in talks with the major labels over bundling an all-you-can subscription plan with iPods. Customers might pay a premium on the devices for access to major label music, possibly for as long they own the device.

Subscription services to date have faced an uphill battle, since they all require DRM on downloaded files, and none of this DRM is compatible with the iPod. iPods account for around three-quarters of the US player market, meaning that any subscription service has a fairly small number of device owners to sell to.

Apple’s entry into the game could change all that, and could make lower-capacity but wireless devices more attractive as music platforms. It’s easier to sell a 16GB iPhone to music lovers, after all, if it can access any song, anywhere, with one upfront payment. But the moment that pundits began to blue-sky about Apple’s volte-face regarding subscriptions, two problems became quickly apparent: 1) Apple wasn’t doing any such thing, and 2) if it did, competitors would start agitating for some serious antitrust action.

The cold, cold water

No one is talking on the record about the situation, so what we have now are a collection of anonymously-sourced statements and heapings of conjecture. Businessweek did its best to quash the rumors, saying that sources had cast doubt on any potential deal. Apple was simply kicking ideas around, we’re told, not seriously trying to push a plan.

CNet claimed that Universal was actually the company pushing the plan, and that Apple was simply seeing if other labels might be up for something similar. The move would make sense, since Universal’s long-rumored “Total Music” plan would bundle access to its catalog with devices, and Universal has already signed on to a similar initiative with Nokia called “Comes With Music.”

Other reports were similar in tone. Yes, ideas like this had been floated, but nothing serious was being discussed.

The antitrust charges

That’s just fine with eMusic CEO David Pakman. eMusic is the number two download service in the US after iTunes and has built a huge stable of indie artists (it has no major label bands), with songs offered for around a quarter a piece. Pakman spent the second half of this week telling journalists that, if Apple was planning a subscription service, it might well be anticompetitive.

The argument is a simple one. “Apple has a monopoly,” Pakman told me Friday, citing their US market share at 80 percent. Companies in that situation have to play by a “different standard,” especially when it comes to anything that could be construed as “tying” (recall that Microsoft was accused of exactly this sort of tying when it rolled new “features” like Internet Explorer into Windows and then had to deal with years of litigation).

“If every iPod comes with [the hypothetical service], that’s tying,” Pakman said. eMusic and others would certainly bring the matter to regulators’ attention. But what if the new service is optional? Would that still be tying?

Pakman concedes that a court would need to hash this out, and he suspects that any such subscription service would in fact be optional. But he raises the specter of an “optional” service that in some ways isn’t; for instance, if Apple offered the upfront payment as an option when iPods were purchased through the Apple store, but made the payment mandatory for devices sold at Best Buy.

In the end, the whole story is “probably more rumor than anything,” Pakman says, and he professes astonishment that the major labels would bind their own digital destinies to Apple. Major label frustration with Apple has been obvious for years, as the majors were upset that Jobs held the line on a single price for all songs, and that iTunes so quickly became the dominant online retailer, thus giving Jobs more power over the labels than they had over him. Now, with the labels opening their DRM-free catalogs to other stores like Amazon, the balance of power may be shifting slightly, but Pakman believes that iTunes continues to account for 95 percent of the major labels’ digital downloads.

Major labels who made it even easier for Apple to control access to a growing part of their revenue stream would simply “continue the slide to their doom.”

A new hope?

We likely won’t see such an Apple-powered subscription model in the near future, then, but what’s most interesting about the story wasn’t the details of the subscription terms of the hardware it would function on. Instead, it was the very fact that subscriptions were attracting so much positive attention. Derided for years as “renting” music (and what consumer would want to do that?), the sudden rumor of a compelling subscription service that allowed unlimited major label content to be accessed and played from iPods and iPhones set the Internet ablaze.

Part of that could simply be due to the reality-distortion field emanating from Cupertino, which converts anything Apple-related into something cool, even if Apple derided the concept as ridiculous right up until its own announcement. But I think there’s more to it, something that makes the subscription model more palatable now than in years past.

In a word, it’s access. Always-on, constantly available, accessible anywhere access. There’s a reason why the interesting action in subscriptions has been happening in portable phones and not in standalone music players, and now that Apple has the hugely-successful iPhone in its lineup, it certainly could  roll out a compelling subscription.

This is the sort of value proposition that competitors haven’t been able to match: the biggest music store combined with the hottest device combined with all the music you want combined with anywhere access. Surely Apple sees the potential here; if it doesn’t, this week’s hubbub should show the company that such a service would be buzz-worthy. Whether we’ll ever see it rolled out is another question.

Related Stories

• Indie labels “revolting” against eMusic’s low prices?
• A brave new world: the music biz at the dawn of 2008
• eMusic’s European expansion
• Indie music, meet telco behemoth: eMusic partners with AT&T

Link to Original Article:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080323-reality-antitrust-concerns-dog-apple-subscription-rumors.html