I was recently reading the 'End Rant' section of Tape Op magazine, a little slick based out of Sacramento, California and Portland, Oregon, which is basically a magazine about recording audio. Their editor, Larry Crane, makes some really interesting points, in an attemt to explain the huge 'climate change' present in the audio recording industry, and to abolish any 'easy answers' to the problem at hand --

He wrote;

"The cost of setting up a studio has dropped drastically due to digital recording technology. We saw the start with the ADAT in 1991 and the devlopment of affordable Mackie consoles. How many small studios suddenly showed up weildin g this equipment? - Many. After ADAT, the DAW slowly crept up from being a two-track editor or MIDI sequencer to a full-blown tracking and mixing platform. As digital storage mediums have gotten cheaper and computers have become faster, the whole system started to take over from analog as the new way to record for both professionals and hobbyists.

Studio rates have been lowering over the last few years. Rooms in 'big time' studios that used to command $1200 are easily found for $500 or less these days. Clients that used to spend four months in a pro studio on big-budget major label releases are apt to build their own studios or only book basic tracking or mixing time instead of booking these places for long-term projects.

The business model of "We have the technology to make records - You don't" is gone. This model allowed many studios to charge whatever prices they could. Hell, most of the time they were billing record labels directly - labels that were making plenty of money on a handful of artists that sold multiple millions of records. The labels now blame illegal downloading (wasn't it home taping in the Eighties?) on the loss of their former profits. I'll blame CD, DVD, videogames, home computers, overpriced concerts, sports events and many other entertainment choices on the diverting of the consumer's entertainment capital. Plus, the revenue of making us repurchase our our LP collections on CD has finally dried up as well.

We can also blame the lack of quality music coming from the big labels - who wants another shitty-ass (insert pop singer's name here) clone or petulant actress-turned-singer who can't sing? Not many adults do. Of course, the labels have been trying to get the older demographic to repurchase their CD collection now as SA-CD, DVD-Audio, or even 5.1 mixes. I don't think it's gonna happen in a big way, though, and it looks like the budgets for these have been dwindling in many cases."