More And More, Musicians Are Working From Their Home Studios

 

It has become increasingly common for musicians to work from home instead of in more traditional studios. This video explains, in part, why and how this phenomenon has taken place.

Included is a transcript of the video script:

It’s no secret that times are changing in the world of audio recording. Projects that used to require entire teams of professionals, instruments and studio spaces are now tasked to a home studio that often consists of little more than a laptop. While a team of people with instruments, recording equipment, and audio engineers may sound like a recipe for success, in this video we will take a look at why most audio projects are being accomplished with the same technology that is in your home computer or tablet.

In today’s digital world, more and more people turn to the internet to find music. Although it is hard to find an exact number to quantify the percentage of just how many bands or artists are discovered through the internet as opposed to more traditional media, a quick google search tells us the internet is now in a virtual tie with radio for music discovery at around 45% for each source. According to a March 13th, 2024 story on cybernews.com, something like 90% of internet users stream music online. With this amount of interest for music coming from the internet, it makes a certain amount of sense people are starting to create music on the devices they browse for music on. But to fully understand why people have turned to modern tech to create music, one has to look at the economy of music. The average single stream on Spotify pays the artist between 0.003 and 0.005 cents, though oftentimes it doesn’t pay at all since there is a threshold for which streams will begin to pay an artist. Specifically, an artist must generate 1,000 streams per track in the past 12 months to earn royalties. This lack of income for artists leaves little incentive to invest in creating albums, particularly in investing in somewhat dated technology and an infrastructure that, at its very core, is set up to profit off the artist. To understand just how widespread this is, one can look at how midi protocol, which was once synonymous with hardware instruments such as Roland’s TR 808 in how it relayed note, velocity and tempo information (as well as other things) is now synonymous with hooking a musical keyboard up to a computer or tablet. And speaking of the Roland TR 808, an 808 itself is now more known for a bass sound that can be tuned and played chromatically downloaded from the internet than the original TR 808 hardware instrument itself.  While one may argue it still helps to have a team of people work on a project as opposed to doing it all oneself, this too has changed in terms of how people connect to collaborate or work on musical projects. Countless websites allow the hiring of musical professionals without the requirement of a shared studio space or ever meeting in person. While some may opt for a more “organic” approach, it is increasingly common for musicians to simply send their music out to be worked on and, in a lot of cases, sent to major artists to add their vocals to. 

Overall, it’s not for the scope of this video to decide if this is a good or bad thing, but simply to point out that, more and more, musicians are working from home.