Everything popular is wrong: Making it in electronic music

The electronic music scene has always had lots of very unusual and interesting business models going on, right back to the late 80s. People in the early rave scene in london were doing stuff in the early 90s that looks modern today.

Consider the idea that there have always been some records out there that DJs consider too good to even play, except at very particular and infrequent times and places. There are artists who keep their identities and even their music and their entire existence secret at the behest of their label manager. This is not just artistic preciousness, it is a key part of a very well-tested business model. There is lots of music out there that is too good to be released, if every guy on the street had a copy it would devalue it and hasten its passing into unfashionability.

It's more than just controlling supply (although thats a lot of it,) its about making the people that have managed/been allowed to hear the mythical secret tunes feel special, part of a lucky few. They are in a sense indebted to the DJ, even though they paid to go and see them perform.

They will tell all their friends, "and then halfway through Blackdown's set he drew for these unlabelled CDRs, it was too much. I've never heard anything like it. I asked him who it was and he wouldn't tell me." They will then post the same thing on message boards, asking if anyone else knew who the tunes were by. Many times, I have paid to go and see a person play just because I know they have access to tunes that nobody else does. That could be the only time I ever get a chance to hear those tunes. That could be the only time those tunes are ever played.

I plan to write some blog posts about this stuff at some point.

For what it's worth I lived in LA for several years after graduating college. Dispite playing in bands and being knee deep in the music industry I found that almost all of the new music I was introduced to as being "great" really sucked, notwithstanding the awesome stuff my late 20's roommate had on his CD rack. This was about 9 years ago.

Fast forward to today, and I've found more great DJs and bands based in Seattle in the past 4 months than I did the entire two years I lived in LA. And the 4 months before that, and the 4 months before that. And this is dwarfed by all the great music new being made all around the world.

I find most of my music through fliers, last.fm friends, hyperlocal news and forums dedicated to particular subgenres. We're so much better networked than we were a decade ago that not being amazed at what is being made (and what has been made under your nose) shows a lack of being hooked into that network, not that great art isn't being made today.

It's easy to mourn the death of an industry. Some really great people were involved in making and promoting some really great things. But it's silly to expect the death of art. The kids are alright.

Interesting to note that his strategy for musicians to differentiate themselves from the Million-man race to the bottom in music is so close to the strategy you need to differentiate yourself from the Million-rentacoder race to the bottom in software consulting:

Differentiate yourself by being better, not by being cheaper or willing to bend over further than the next guy.

There's always a place in any market for really good stuff at a premium price. Slot yourself firmly in to that position, and you have a lot better shot.

This piece speaks of the democratization of the access to electronic music, but fails to properly address the democratization of its production. It is mentioned, but there is no suggestion that it may affect the sales average per producer.

Its basic supply/demand imho : internet brings perhaps a tenfold increase in electro demand, but also a hundredfold (or more if you count in the likes of http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/) increase in production.

There is also that, while demand rose, I don't believe that the core group that would buy the music if they couldn't get it for free augmented that much. Those are typically the people who pay for vinyls and for live performance nowadays.

Posted this because I think it applies to a lot more than music alone.

Thanks for the article. This brought back memories for me of learning and making electronic music in the college lab back in the 80s -- analog gear on reel tape, and later digital + MIDI.

It requires some real dedication at this to make a living, and I wish the practitioners the best. I live in the sticks, so I don't think I'll be catching many performances (plus the family vs concert attendance). However, I think the download services (e.g. - Amazon, iTunes) do have something to offer if you can get hooked up, and get word of mouth support from friends of friends.

Interesting article, but I definitely do believe that it is a bit muddled and oblivious. Yes, you should not study Ricardo Villalobos as a template to emulate any more than you would for Mozart -- if you like that music, you digest it and enjoy it and then create something that is intrinsically yours; how could you genuinely just want to produce something that is exactly someone else's vision and aesthetic? I am a bit skeptical of the author's potential embedded assumptions about what ought to spur and what currently does enable music composition as a full-time career path.

My biggest issue with that article is how much weight it seems to place on the "lucky idiot" theory: why assume that the cycle of the guy who 'makes it' for a few weeks of popularity and then abandoned for the next hot thing actually implies anything general about "making it" in electronic music? I don't want to jump to conclusions, but I detect a hint of an entitlement complex there -- namely that if one wishes to be a musician badly enough and works hard enough at it with enough genuine passion and self honesty, that person deserves a career. That's ridiculous. Those qualities are always important, but being a working artist of any kind requires an audience--that's not just an afterthought that's tacked on after the fact or something which can be separated from the production process itself, but something that's embedded into the whole creative process.

If you are not able to discover a desire to experience something that a large group of people express and are not able to find, why should you get any money or indeed any indication for you to continue your current strategy of earning a living by producing art? You can't ever just jump on a bandwagon and ignore your own individual vision, but you need to balance it with an ability to connect with supply and demand forces of a market if you want to making a living out of it. You can complain all you want about the imperfections of the current system (it has its warts), but shouldn't you be focusing more on continuing to develop an audience whose desires align with your creative vision, and just generally experimenting with the understanding that some experiments fail? I don't understand how anyone can ever feel entitled to being an artist as a stable, full time job without the risks, hard work and inevitable rejection that must be dealt with along the way.

Further thought about the "lucky idiot" idea: of course fashion trends exist and have their girth, but the cultures connected to various strains of art (along with their surrounding environment) are always a more meaningful lens to look through. Of course, I am looking at this through the eyes of someone who loves composing, mixing, experiencing and thinking about the nature of electronic dance music while simultaneously being skeptical about committing to making it a full time job. It's certainly possible, but it's not guaranteed--there's a lot of competition and a tough market, which requires a decent exit strategy if one tries and fails at it. I know some talented musicians who do not have trouble making music their day job, but they 1) are talented, 2)understand and have experience with the reality of being a performing artist, and 3)have a direct connection and investment in their audience. The last bit is the most important part for me -- the direct connection part. I am not sure if I will ever want to make music my day job, but it is an important part of my life, so I invest a lot of care into it--I've got to say, the environment for making electronic music nowadays with just ONE site (Soundcloud) is wonderful.

For what it's worth, I really love Soundcloud. As a programmer, I really have to admire how minimalistic and useful its design is as well as how it well it implements the freemium model. The free account is usable, but the premium levels are worth their costs, enough for me to actually have one because of the value it provides to me. That's pretty cool. As an artist, It's probably the web application that has helped my artistic endeavors the most in a way that I really don't think would be so possible without. It has succeeded in creating an application that connects an enormous community of musicians with each other through as directly as possible: the music. It's really cool to observe how it has actually made a geographic space from the virtual space of the signal trace of an audio clip -- when you comment on a track, you can make either a general comment or a timed comment. For a timed comment, a blip appears over the point in time in the track that you're making the comment over, so anyone who subsequently listens to that track can experience not just the music as it plays back in real time, but what other people have said about certain parts of it, as those parts come up when you listen to it. For someone who creates music, this opens up the way you and your social network connect to music. If someone starts following you, you can immediately grasp some of the music they've written and the responses they've got and vice versa. If there's a producer you really dig, you can muster up the courage to send them a track of yours and ask for their feedback -- I've done that lately, and I've been amazed that they even respond at all. They're producers that have enormous followings and are already really successful, but they can still find the time to listen to a track I wrote and give me feedback.

To witness a producer you respect and admire give you positive feedback about a track you wrote is a pretty incredible and deeply validating feeling; that kind of feeling is the kind that motivates you to keep working on your music and keep going on it despite how challenging it is. It's also independent of your ability to turn it into a profession. I dunno, but that throughout the article, I never got the impression that the author's analysis was aware of that whole evolutionary process of creating music, connecting to others who create music and giving/receiving feedback that I experience/am in awe of with my soundcloud. (http://soundcloud.com/airlab-am if you're curious--I feel weird about plugs but I think it makes sense in this case so you can contextualize how I am responding to this article's description of the music making process relative to my music own music)

Goodness. That's a really long wall of text. I hope someone enjoys it. I'm glad that this kind of thread can come up on hackernews and get this kind of a lively discussion though!

The same can be said for 99cent apps. The access to sales channel has been democratized and this creates a massive inventory of software. Some of which are very good, but still forced to price at a very low level. A piece of software like iPad's GarageBand at 5.99 - who could have believed this?

I used plugins and Cubase for years, then I bought the greatest analogue synth ever (Oberheim Xpander) for a fortune - noting that it's gone up in value - and then in 2009 I bought some mixing desks, 2 samplers, and a 24-bit, 96k Emu soundcard for mastering. The basic idea was, if everyone else is doing it with plugins, I'll make it sound different by using analogue gear everyone is throwing out cheap on Ebay.

Techno was in a big way about cheap synths in thrift shops, and I think it's coming full circle: mixers and samplers are the new wave.

Looking at the "Closer to what today’s typical studio looks like" picture, it appears this setup is sans speakers, and I don't think the two Apple Macs compensate for this...

Anyone know Venetian Snares' business model?

I don't believe he has such a thing.

Proof that good electronic music with artful classical influences gets zero attention is that this comment would be at the bottom of the page with a sub-zero rating. http://soundcloud.com/alxander/cravings