I don't have any special industry experience. I went on a tear a few weeks ago and watched a bunch of Rick Beato's videos on YouTube. I didn't know the guy before running across his work, but he has 5 million subscribers and he sure sounds like he knows what he's talking about. He's been a music producer for 30 years.
Anyway, he was the one that made the point that we don't sign rock bands anymore in the sense that they're not moving the industry. All you gotta do is look at the top songs that folks are listening to on Spotify or the radio and you'll immediately see what I'm talking about.
He was also the one that walked through the process of setting up mics for a drum kit and pointed out that it's just very expensive to get the studio time and the expertise to do all that correctly. He actually walks you through a studio where he's set up mics for a drum kit and explains why it's so difficult to do well. He then contrasts that with simply using samples that are professionally provided and that the cost difference is just immense.
Anyway, I don't need to die on this hill. My point was the music industry is going downhill regardless and AI is just one of many tools paving the way.
I agree 100% that mic-ing live drums is by far the hardest and most expensive element in rock recording
But in the 1970s-2000s it was complete black magic and without dedicating years to the craft - you were up to the whims of studios for how much you pay
Compare that today, for instance have a look at the Jazz-Rock Fusion band Vulfpeck’s first album. If you exclude the cost of instruments - they often only need three (rather cheap) mics. Everything else DI. Recorded in a basement for less than a couple grand - with effectively infinite recording time
Live drums are expensive compared to samples, but they’re not the reason an entire genre disappeared
Rick Beato is fine but he’s entirely disconnected from contemporary guitar-based music. I agree entirely with the OP, the quality-expense ratio has never been better for this type of music.
Like with software, I'm thinking there's two different discussions: what powers the industry vs. what is possible for hobbyists.
While the industry in software is obsessed with React and K8s, hackers still like self-hosting PHP apps. Same with music. The industry is powered by highly efficient teams that write, produce, and perform music at scale for a global audience, and that's totally different from contemporary guitar-based music (I suspect!) What's possible is very different from what makes money.
Not sure about this year but either two or three years ago over 90% of the University of New England’s grant money (over $20MM) was from the School of Agriculture
I hate many aspects of the Australian economy (especially our lack of economic diversity) but having world-best tech for farming isn’t one of them. America is still leaps and bounds behind us in many different subdomains of Agriculture and Mining
Australia is weak for only really having primary industries, but we sure are very optimised for it
You can buy and sell x-year leases from the crown. Any with a commercially viable site sell for just below or even more than freehold land (depending on supply)
Farming logistics also works radically differently than in America: the reason our farms are orders of magnitude higher larger than American ranches spatially is because it’s only somewhat profitable at the largest possible scales
The valley I’m from originally (The Tweed) is cane country, and not a single company is viable independently. Hell we only have one mill left nationally that’s not-megacorp owned (note we have no land leases though, it’s all freehold where I’m from)
I have to often explain to customers after a certain price point (for me ~$200+ AUD) you have to turn the speed trim pot down for it to be enjoyable at all
Similar to what Gran Turismo 7 players have realised with EV “Vision” Cars - car enjoyment greatly diminishes with speed after a certain point - instead of plateauing
No-name Chinese build quality is actually a lot higher than I’d’ve anticipated though - brushed thick aluminium and even steel chassis are pretty common now
Obviously engineering is broader than just trade-offs. I agree that broad heuristics can be useful but the ones proposed in this article just seem bad. Dependencies are (again, obviously?) really useful in many contexts. Same with build steps and frameworks.
Things like Wordpress sound super simple - you don’t even need to code!
But you do need to worry about managing an entire Apache server, managing a crappy database, hardcoding bullshit in PHP, cronjobs, cloud deployment and the fact that almost all “features” of it like plugins and themes etc are massive security vulnerabilities
I think the pitfall to avoid ITT is that there’s a single source of maintenance effort - there are likely many!
If the problem you are trying to solve is "I need to put content online and have a storefront for my product", there are plenty of hosting providers who will happily take care of all the headache from Wordpress for less than $10/month.
I was exhausted with keeping up with Android, but was not buying n-number of Lightning cables until they released it on USB-C
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