economy and soundscape

I’ve been an independent musician consistently for over a year now, returning after a long break. the industry is far different from how things were in the past when I really got started; infinite singularity as a project was last fully active between 2002 and 2004, and though I never stopped creating (played in a band 2006-2013, performed solo acoustic 2008-2017, never stopped recording studio music) it’s been interesting to see how things work differently now.

One of the struggles I face that I share with most indies is how hard it is to make any money. Streaming pays only small fractions of a cent while also all but guaranteeing that people will seldom buy physical media. That means money basically must come from merchandising, product placement, or live performances. I live in a shed in the woods; it’s time-consuming to send stuff out (the nearest airport is closer than the nearest post office, and the post office always has a long line because it serves all the people around here who live in the woods); I don’t know about “branding” and as a solo artist in a remote area, live performance opportunities are limited. I have noticed it’s unseemly to talk about “the money” in art—people immediately think “you’re in it for the money,” that you’re compromising your artistic vision to line your pockets. This way of thinking comes from the fact that the art economy works very differently from the rest of the economy.

There was a French sociologist named Pierre Bourdieu who first talked about this in his book “The Field of Cultural Production,” a great read for any artist willing to take it on. Basically being “elite” in art means appealing to a smaller, more specific audience of tastemakers and presumably not having to worry about “the money”; music that has mass appeal is “low brow” and may make a lot of money but is shallow, without substance, appeals to the lowest common denominator, and so on. Bourdieu isn’t a snob—in a way he’s mocking artists’ and gatekeepers’ elitism. He would say that us independent musicians, like other artists, must develop a “feel for the game” (he called it a habitus) within the current “field” of music (or industry, though, again, the rules for art are different from other industries). Our success is based on our ability to both innovate and show our understanding of the cultural field by positioning our work within it deliberately and effectively, being culturally understandable and appeasing gatekeepers while also creating something distinctive.

It's cynical, but there’s something to that. For most of us, we don’t make money, yet the money must matter, because unless you’re upper-middle class or better financially (which, let’s admit, many successful artists are), you probably don’t have enough money to not worry about how expensive it is to make music. With changes to platforms like spotify, we independents cannot necessarily count on making any money from streaming at all in the future. We must be prepared for that; adapt our habitus to the field, as Bourdieu would say, whether by adjusting our approach and expectations or working to try to change the field (and probably both).

This leads me to some practical questions. I have long paid for professional mastering for many of my songs, partly to offset the fact that I use older equipment with more limitations. I record real-time and partly analog using vocals, guitar, bass, keys, and drums (increasingly a drum machine, but otherwise zero sampled instruments) on a standalone digital audio workstation I bought in 2006; and I have an outdated laptop I pulled out of the garbage back in 2017. This limits my ability to make use of the new technologies for recording and mastering, but I am concerned I would lose something essential to my sound if I fully abandoned the gear I’ve spent all these years working with. In any case, I also do not have budget to much change these things right now.

I question whether it even makes sense to hold my music to industry standards anyhow. Demands that radio-ready songs have roughly the same volume have led to widespread use of “compression” and “limiters” to basically increase the volume by reducing the dynamics, the range between the quieter and louder parts of a song. This also removes aspects of the tone and tends to reduce the organic character of the music to squeeze more volume out of it. You can see the problem—the “loudness wars” as producers call it, an arms race to make music louder and louder, in which things like atmosphere and timbre and other “old school” characteristics of the sound tend to disappear. It’s also why more and more popular music sounds more and more the same.

Then there’s the fact that all the major streaming platforms, where almost nine-tenths of music is listened to now, have their own compression setups. This isn’t sound compression, but compression of information, of file sizes. Ever notice how different mp3 and CDs or wav files sound? That’s because mp3s are super compressed, removing the “unnecessary” elements to make the file size smaller. Hundreds of thousands of songs are uploaded to streaming services per day and the vast majority never get played more than a handful of times. Having the data storage and server bandwidth (and staff and electric bill, etc.) to store and stream that much data is obviously not free, and after paying their expenses they’re not actually turning a profit on most of what we make, either. So, they compress the files to a standard that limits certain aspects of them, essentially further reducing the quality of the sound (even though in many cases it’s barely noticeable). We often don’t make money, and often, neither do they. I foresee them either further compressing sound, adding more ads to free accounts like youtube has done, charging more money for subscriptions overall, further cracking down on fake engagement and paid streams, or raising prices for higher-quality, less-compressed sound (probably some of all of these). They just can’t create or maintain a sustainable business model with all this content uploaded every day otherwise.

So, there are two processes going on between when the music is recorded by the artist or producer and when the listener streams it, and both affect the quality in different ways. The question for me is whether it’s worth it in 2023 to “loudness wars” master something that was recorded on “old school” gear, especially if it changes the sound, only to be compressed by the streaming service, which changes the sound again. Should I be paying for mastering? Is it worth it? Is it making the music sound closer to, or less like, the vision I had when creating it? Again, it’s also practical—could I save money and headaches and get something equally good, or maybe even better in some ways, out of the process by forgoing mastering?

I know there is chaos in the industry right now, but I’m not leaving any of the major streaming services, because I submit all my work through a distributor, and it just doesn’t make sense to me to pick and choose based on current events. Tomorrow, other streaming services might unfavorably change their policies; I pay people a small fee to distribute my music widely because I don’t need the headaches of chasing, or trying to boycott/punish businesses over, what usually amounts to small change, at best, anyway (full disclosure: I am on track to earn maybe 300 dollars in streaming royalties this year, less than a dollar a day, decreasing as policies have changed, and nowhere near what it cost to master, copyright, distribute, or market the music). I don’t focus first and foremost on making money; and don’t try to make something that “appeals to the masses” anyway, but I also can’t afford to turn music into a money-suck because I have never had enough money not to have to worry about money and doubt I ever will.

This isn’t just a blog entry; it’s a new year’s resolution. On Friday, January 5, 20 years from the release of the second infinite singularity album “silence,” I have scheduled the release of “a forgotten name,” which is about the closest thing to an enduring “hit song” I’ve made. It will be available in both the fully professionally mastered version and the “rough mix” version (what I did in my own studio, untouched by any other hands), and the original album version (recorded/mastered in 2003 and released the following year, but not remastered like the silence re-release early this year). I want to see how different they really are. But I am much more interested in how you, the listener, experiences them, and welcome your thoughts.

In the end, I want to release the most honest, best quality music I can, while also considering that I’m a broke independent artist, so that I can hopefully find my people, build momentum, and continue to do this for many years to come.

Here’s a picture of the sunset from outside my shed.