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> not some guy programming the guitars, drums tracks and bass and then does the vocals himself?

Some highly regarded albums that use that exact process, all are five stars on Allmusic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_Riot_Goin%27_On

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_Mind

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Hate_Machine

Another that legend has it was recording the same way, albeit under different circumstances:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siamese_Dream

Another recent one that the verdict is still out on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currents_(Tame_Impala_album)

Though I'm not sure if it meets critical acclaim standards, Tom Scholz basically recorded the debut Boston album in his basement[1] and that thing sold 25 million.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Scholz

Also I grew up playing with his Rockman device and it was sincerely one of the coolest guitar innovations a kid could have access to early on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockman_%28amplifier%29

> Another that legend has it was recording the same way, albeit under different circumstances:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siamese_Dream

I read the wikipedia entry and it's quite a stretch :].

Yeah, I agree 100%, especially with respect to Wikipedia's description of it. It's just something I've always heard around, but I definitely don't have an even remotely reliable source. Here's what Allmusic says about it: "Corgan eventually played almost all the instruments himself (except for percussion)."

http://www.allmusic.com/album/siamese-dream-mw0000099414

"Except percussion" is a pretty big exception on Pumpkins records!

Some of Van Halen's albums were done at home, in his home recording studio named "5150".

I believe the "Beat It" guitar solo was also recorded there. Because there was no legal paperwork with MJ's mgmt., that was a freebie - to the utter dismay of his label.

"home studio"

https://static.gearslutz.com/board/imgext.php?u=http%3A%2F%2...

>>It used to be the good bands would eventually rise to the top and the shitty garage bands would be relegated to small venues.

really? Are you sure? Plenty of big bands did not deserve it but were well marketed and plenty of smaller toilet stop tour bands deserved it and never made it.

This guy does it all alone, never gets hardly any recognition and yet he's still pumping out great songs after a bunch of years:

https://soundcloud.com/plastic-pieces

I see what you did there.

The question is a good one. How does one differentiate themselves from the pack. The same goes for just about any art form today. There are so many artists and so many works, many of them good enough to tickle your fancy and yet the majority of them will only get a tiny fraction of the consideration they deserve.

I would love to publish music or books, but I know that given my dysfunctional relationship with social media, that I am just about wasting my time doing any of the above, even if I had a shred of talent.

What does your dysfunctional relationship with social media have to do with producing works of art? I honestly just didn't follow your train of thought.

The arts have to be their own reward. If you're making art for money, and not the love, it's probably not worth doing.

For better or worse, the marketplace is finally realizing this.

I do not agree with that. When I produce music of coarse I feel good with what I did and of coarse I enjoy listening to it. The art is what makes me happy. But god I would have loved to make money with my passion. Some people are passionated by numbers, some by art. In the end it's a product and if you want to make money with it it is fine.

I'm not saying that it's wrong to want to make money off of art. I'm happy for those who can.

I'm saying that if money is the dominant motivating factor in producing art, expect to be disappointed. Technology has reduced many costs of artistic production and has led to an oversupply of "content." To the cold, uncaring marketplace, you're effectively being compensated by those good feelings involved in the process of imagining, producing, and sharing art.

Even so, I draw and record music for my own enjoyment, and to collaborate with friends.

To make someone else happy, teach them how to make music themselves, rather than giving them your music ;)

I guess I was assuming that there is a link between reaching people through social media and success in the arts. If I want to sell a book or album and I am not backed by a large publisher, I would likely have to market the book myself. The best way would probably be through social media.

Ah, got it. Yeah, publishers and record labels seem to serve primarily as well-oiled marketing machines these days.

But surely you could organize your own precision-strike book or album release via targeted online ads. I'd be surprised if there weren't lots of companies trying to sell this service.

> How does one differentiate themselves from the pack.

That's called marketing, and it's something the major labels are exceptionally good at.

Also, btw, the problem need to be solved for the software industry as well, which at this point is starting to resemble the arts: few big earners stoking the dreams of the many, and many, many others fighting over the scraps.

The world today is still kind to the western developer, but how do we solve this problem for developers now so that we don't have to figure it out in the future?

Programmers are the new rock stars.

> There's just way too much noise to signal ratio for me to sit and search for hours on end to find one decent band

I find Podcasts on Music AWESOME for discovery: http://www.npr.org/podcasts/510019/all-songs-considered

Or University radio stations, they're still around and have charts http://www.earshot-online.com/charts/citr.cfm

The old ways of playing local and building a following are still available. Maybe you won't see the same crazy success numbers a teenage girl dancing around with a violin on YouTube can get, but that's the fuggin lottery anyway.

The old ways of building a following are still available, but much, much less so than say in the 90's. Many of the local clubs have gone out of business, as you're more likely to make more money in a commercial space doing almost anything other than staging live music. There are of course exceptions, as in music hubs like LA and Austin, but around the Bay Area for example, I'd say 50% or more of the local clubs have shut down. Edit: typo.

For me, it's still primarily http://last.fm/ 's similar artist feature.

I've had the opposite experience with Last.fm. I actually realized last week that my scrobbling was broken, and I wasn't particularly disappointed.

Last.fm used to be a place where I could check out bands I had never heard of. It was like the website equivalent of the friend who spends all day listening to new music, and will recommend music that is eerily perfect for you.

I feel like the "similar artists" function has changed to prioritize artists that are already extremely popular, even if a much less popular artists is much more similar to the band you are currently listening to. It's plausible I know a lot more bands than I used to, and that new bands are inherently less novel to me. However, I believe this is a trend that can be followed across almost all websites.

As evidence, you only need to look at the changes Facebook made in the same time period. They study the interactions their users make as much as any company, and they've ensured that their users spend the most time on Facebook and provide them with as much data as possible. Facebook used to show every update on the new feed. Now I rarely see posts from anyone I disagree with. I used to get a lot of my information about bands from their Facebook groups. Now the only updates I get are from the major companies I've liked, because they can pay to send a message.

I totally understand why large websites are doing this. These services are most profitable as an advertising platform. In the case of Last.fm, the people listening to John Doe and the Backup Band aren't going to make them money. This 'cultivation' has an extremely chilling effect on the variety and depth of news, viewpoints, etc. that allowed the internet to foster an explosion in creative expression.

there is some new music on http://www.thesixtyone.com/, the site came back to life again at the beginning of this year.

The problem with last.fm (and almost all similar music services) is that a lot of the similarity they encapsulate is chronological and social similarity, rather than musical similarity. For example, a search for Nirvana pulls up Hole (social similarity, the Courtney Love connection) and Pearl Jam (social & chronological similarity) quite high on the list, even though neither really sounds that much like Nirvana. On the other hand, The Pixies, which are musically much closer to Nirvana aren't even on the list.

How do you measure similarity to capture what you want?

The obvious approach is that you look for "people who like this, like that". This is easy to measure and understand. And when you're faced with a person who liked this, it is usually the right answer.

The problem is that you don't know WHY people who like this, like that. Often it is simply, "Heard both at an impressionable age." What you want it to be is, "On the musical criteria that I can recognize, this music is similar." But that's a complex piece of logic, and it is not clear how to do so.

Which makes the tools really good for rediscovering all of the stuff from your childhood, and really bad for discovering new music that is similar to stuff you like.

You do it by objectively analyzing the music from a technical standpoint. That's how last.fm started; it was someone's research project to look for "musical DNA" and then use that "signature" to find similar music. It actually worked well.

Pandora is actually the site that was borne out of the music DNA project.

> As a huge music fan, how do I sort through all the noise to find a truly good band, and not some guy programming the guitars, drums tracks and bass and then does the vocals himself?

Eh? Do you mean you don't like it unless you know the band is full of good instrumentalists or that you find too much stuff that's not done well?

Not my comment but I had to read that a couple times too - I think it's more a reference to the latter part, as in, things not done well. A one-person shop might make a lot of excuses and not have the ability to reach quality production to the point of hiding the fact it's just a one-person shop.

Fundamentally I don't disagree; it takes a lot to 'sound pro' and a lot falls short...it's been a multi-year learning process on my end and I'm still nowhere near 'pro' engineer level, though some tracks might fool ears here and there.