(Music Production) Plug-In Capitalism
bellonamag.com
bellonamag.com
I'm overall sympathetic with the concerns from the article about risks of monopolization of the audio production space, but Behringer and others making cheap gear is not that. The commoditization of previously out-of-reach capabilities only serves to broaden music's reach and diversity. If auto-mix plugins are pushing in a direction of homogeneity, widespread distribution of cheap gear counteracts that homogeneity by giving many more musicians the ability to stay relevant.
The Minimoog came out in 1970, and you can buy a new one for about $3500 today. Or you can buy a Behringer Model D for about $350. It’s not going to have the same level of performance, but it still puts that sound in the hands of way more people.
If you can’t compete with an imitation of something you made 50 years ago, selling for 90% less, then you’re not innovating.
Eurorack and semi-modular stuff is getting more and more popular these days. If you design another semi-modular sound module out of a slightly different combination of the same underlying modules we’ve had since the the 1960s, you’re not innovating.
DFAM is kinda cool in that, if you like that sound, you can get it for a bit less money than it costs to buy the individual modules in Eurorack form. Or maybe you like normalled signal paths. But I can’t see why Behringer should be ashamed of copying it. There’s just not much substance to copy.
We don't have recourse to stop them from doing so, but it feel fundamentally dishonorable and pathetic and it is a type of behavior that should not be rewarded.
Meanwhile, Behringer is good at supply chain management and vertical integration, and that is uncool, unsexy work. It is not valued because it is the domain of MBAs, and MBAs are not cool.
This kind of judgment about what is cool and not cool is not my scene. These analog modules are so damn cookie-cutter to begin with. I don’t care if you invented them, or if you got them out of a cookbook, or if you just bought an IC. (You might have bought that IC from Behringer, though! Who else makes BBDs?) I mostly care about making music, and the idea that people should spend $700 on a DFAM instead of, like, $220 for a Behringer Edge just seems cartoonish at face value.
Incidentally, the $480 price difference between the Behringer Edge and the Moog DFAM is exactly the price I paid for a block of one-on-one voice lessons. I feel way better about spending the money that way.
Just like it's an asshole move to clone the Arturia Keystep, a pretty simple and accessible MIDI controller costing around US$ 100. Why would Behringer clone it except for being an immoral company?
Cloning designs on synth world is a big no-no if the original is still in production.
I really don't get how you can defend Uli Behringer's schenanigans, he has had a lot of them.
This hand waving of a practice that is extremely frowned upon in the synth subculture is very off putting. Even more when I read with this techy-talk about "innovation", give me a break... Uli Behringer is an asshole, a narcissistic one.
Could you rephrase that? I’m not sure I can dig out what you’re trying to say.
> Cloning designs on synth world is a big no-no if the original is still in production.
Why is it a no-no?
> I really don't get how you can defend Uli Behringer's schenanigans, he has had a lot of them.
Oh, he’s done plenty of shitty things. I don’t think that cloning hardware is shitty. How do you feel about Malt-O-Meal cereals?
> This hand waving of a practice that is extremely frowned upon in the synth subculture is very off putting.
I don’t frown upon it. I don’t think it’s wrong. My behavior of buying a Behringer synthesizer, one of the most popular brand of synthesizers, is not off-putting to most people.
> Uli Behringer is an asshole, a narcissistic one.
I don’t care. I’m not going to, like, sit in my basement running Temple OS just so I can avoid using products made by assholes. People should face consequences for their actions, but I don’t buy products as some deranged way of voting on which CEO I like the best.
Copying a currently in production design that some other company devoted resources to come up with is immoral in my worldview even if it's not illegal, it's a shit move and I don't condone it by not buying their products. The CEO basically being the company is why I throw Uli's name around.
I don't really get how you can defend them copying the Arturia Keystep, it's close to the pinnacle of a shit company to clone something that was already inexpensive (as far as music gear goes), it's a cash-grab in everything they do.
You do you, of course.
I already think patent protections are a bit too strong, and this kind of stuff is not even up to the level where it would get patent protections in the first place. Let me ask… is it an asshole move to make a Photoshop clone? Or is that fair game? Is it okay to buy a strat-style guitar from Kramer, or should I stick with Fender? Is G&L a gray area?
I agree, and it actually goes further than that in our complex global economy which there's no such thing as simple "good guys" and "bad guys".
Love them or hate them, Behringer is the only one producing the replica chips used in all sorts of guitar pedals, synths, etc. Tons of boutique guitar pedal/synth/effects shops only can exist because they can source the core chips they need from Behringer to base their custom designs around. Behringer may have started as a leech on the industry, but they are now enabling large parts of the industry.
Lol. Most producers talk about how the plugins are fairly interchangeable, and almost none of them will really change how you work or the sound you get. The VST / plugin market seems really saturated. Not like it’s so saturated that you can’t make money, but any problem you want solved is likely solved by a battery of different plugins.
People fetishize hardware and talk about how it’s essential to the sound that they want, and usually, when you dig into it, you can replace 95% of your hardware with something else and end up with something nearly indistinguishable. There might be some synth or guitar pedal that you are in love with, or even several, but it rarely turns out to be critical to your personal sound. Like, if you want to sound like Van Halen, maybe you want to buy an EVH cab, but don’t bother tracking down exact replicas of guitars and amps… despite the fact that fans obsess over his guitars and amps, that stuff is easy to replicate.
The software side is similar, it’s just that most people don’t fetishize specific pieces of software beyond, say, drooling over a few big names like Serum, Omnisphere, or Pro Tools.
> Once monopolisation is achieved, enclosure accelerates, locking users into an ecosystem with few alternatives or competitors.
I’m not convinced monopolization is going to happen. What I see happening today is that the software and hardware is so cheap it’s ridiculous. The prices have been falling for ages. More companies are making this stuff than ever before. The platform seems wide open. Tons of free VSTs, even good ones, abound from tons of different software companies. Real analog synth hardware is way cheaper (Behringer) than it ever was, even in nominal dollars.
Meanwhile, a lot of the stuff you see at music stores seems to be glorified toys. DAWless setups aimed at Instragram or YouTube which are terrible for producing music, but look good on video. I’m not trying to be gatekeeper here and say what “real music” is, or how you should make it, but there are segments of the music equipment industry which are competing against Lego. That’s where the money is.
After all, real, working musicians seem to have less money these days, so it’s only natural that the industry shifts. As far as I can tell, this is what an infusion of capital will be aiming at—people with discretionary income that love music toys (whether or not they actually make music with it—it varies).
That quote from Adorno is really wedged in there, I guess you gotta show off who you read.
It’s a not very subtle attack on music software though the lens of oppression, and even making the software more accessible is seen as bad because they didn’t make unique music with it. It’s like not knowing how to play a Stradivarius and so the violin is the issue, not the player who didn’t use it properly. It’s quit telling they don’t publish the music they made, or show samples, it’s a bad artist blaming everything but themselves for the bad music they made.
The 303 defined acid, the Juno gabba and early rave, and sliced 4 bars of a single song defined jungle. Maybe in what you're saying is true, but on the other hand for other genres, synths = genre
Like, 90% of what made 303 lines sound unique is in the sequencer, which you can program into a DAW or something once you know how it’s done (it’s a fairly basic step sequencer with a couple quirks, but those quirks are easy to replicate). Use a simple subtractive synth, turn the filter knob around, set the resonance pretty high, and bam… you’ve got acid.
That’s what I mean when I say that something rarely turns out to be critical to your sound. Once you understand how a sound is made, it makes it possible to achieve similar sounds in other ways.
That last 10% is not something that people listening to your music care about, by and large. The TB-303 has a unique diode filter design… kind of weird, you might say “3+1 poles” (is it 24 dB/oct? or 18 dB/oct?) with a built-in high-pass filter. However, despite the fact that the TB-303 has such a unique filter design, and the 303 sound defines acid, and the 303 filter is a key part of that sound, you can replace the filter with some boring random 4-pole VCF and still end up with an acid track.
So you don’t need a 303. This is good news! It means that it’s easier to create acid than it ever was. The 303 is no longer manufactured. You can grab a cheap clone like the TB-03, TD-3, or program the 303 sound into a more powerful synthesizer that you already own.
I see you know your 303s :)
The acid I can get from a Virus or SH-101 is acid but not from a 303, and the sequencing I can get from a Rytm definitely has that slide/glide vibe, so I totally get what you're saying.
... I guess if you know what you're doing you can make anything sound like something else, especially in a mix, it's just that sticking with a certain synth for that sound can make it hell of a lot easier
... you're totally right - the easier it is, the more time you spend making music!
If you even want to get rid of MS windows or MacOS, then reaper is the right tool for the job. Together with the zynthian synths you have a (semi) open source production environment.
I think the problem is that many electronic musicians these days do not have the knowledge how to program a synth. They just use the pre-canned sounds that come with NI.
I’m snapping up decent pieces of software that will be stable and usable for the lifetime of my hobby.
Logic Pro’s free upgrades are a godsend.
>Francisco’s agenda is clear: democratization leads to consolidation, which leads to platformization, which leads to profits.
No its not clear, its their fantasy projected.
>Adobe, whose extortionate Creative Cloud suite includes Photoshop, Lightroom, InDesign, and Premiere Pro, has near-monopolistic control of visual and design culture, as well as the education institutions that teach art and design. It is now essentially a compulsory investment for the precarious creative worker in those fields; the means of cultural production are being rebranded as capital investments.
What does this mean? It has a monopoly over design culture? So all art made with Adobe looks the same? You can tell if art was made with photoshop? You can tell what photos were edited by Lightroom? You didn't need to buy them before since now the means of cultural production are being rebranded as capital investments?
>Musicians need more recourse to seize their means of production.
The companies release plugins and cheaper software, what does this phrase even mean? Do they have a monopoly? Do they not have the ability to produce music now? Do free alternatives not exist? Why is the writer so bothered by this specific one?
> According to Angela McRobbie, this centralized model has morphed into what is now described as the ‘creative industries,’ which privileges the economizing of individual self-expression, subjects it to the free market in lieu of government funding or patronage, and downplays the collective identities that help to create politically engaged art and culture.
Who? Some random name that I never heard of? What does this mean? Products are cheaper and more accessible, so it’s economizing self expression? They want the government to pay musicians since that’s how all music was made before these plugins?
You can’t make political art or culture since these tools are too white or colonialist and you can’t have creatives collaborate or have a collective identity?
> Despite non-Western tuning systems being easy to implement in theory, they are not readily accessible for most software instruments, an issue that musician and researcher Khyam Allami has recently addressed with his transcultural generative music apps.
They’re easy to implement, yet the people saying it’s easy can’t implement it themselves and they’re complaining about it while relying on a corporation to make it? How ridiculous is this?
Several examples were given, referencing available music scales and tools for eliminating dialect and individual variation. They also gave citations for what they meant where they introduced this complaint. [1]
1. Philip Ewell, ‘Music Theory and the White Racial Frame’ Music Theory Online, 26(2), 2020 <https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.20.26.2/mto.20.26.2.ewell.html>. ↑
Does it refuse to get rid of dialect and variation if the race of the person processed is white? If it doesn’t it doesn’t make it white. I’m not reading the whole crazy pointless long article about more fake problems, the abstract is ridiculous enough.
They complain about the company stealing cultural music, while they complain that nonwhite world music doesn’t exist and can’t be made on it. They can’t have it both ways. https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/spot... it’s just another meaningless complaint that has no bearing on reality like all their complains. How stupid are they to complain it’s both taking cultural music and not allowing people to make anything but white music?
For it to remove any dialect, it has to consider some dialect as standard. Think about it.
> I’m not reading the whole crazy pointless long article about more fake problems, the abstract is ridiculous enough.
Well if you're going to question-beg, then you can't really complain can you.
The rest of what you said is a different complaint than the one I answered, so you're moving the goal post but then setting up a straw man of what that person wrote when you say such music can't be made on it. They were specific in what they said and it didn't exclude the possibility of making some of it with it.
This subject is definitely something that's been discussed a lot in music lately, so apparently it's not that meaningless to many people. Adam Neely has a popular video on what people are talking about if you're curious. [1]
I wish the writing style was more clear and succinct. This writer desperately needs an editor. It's hard to tell exactly what they are really trying to say. Instead they meander across a few different broad points like "capitalism is bad" or "the cultural imperialism of western music tech companies is diminishing representation of non-western musical traditions." and it's hard to know exactly what they're ultimately getting at. Instead they pepper the reader with lots of vague grievances without focusing on anything in particular or tying it together in a novel way.
While these critiques can certainly be valid, the author doesn't seem to have much to add to old tropes regarding topics of design and product development. There are so many pedantic and silly points for me to contest in this essay that it would bore everyone to go through all of them. Let's see if we can't, instead, address some of the larger points:
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POINT #1: Capitalism is having a negative effect on the domain of music making plugins:
I don't see it. As a producer and audio engineer of 15+ years it's never been a better time to be a music maker. New and existing tools grant music makers tremendous creative power. I can now do processes that would have taken my predecessors 10x as much effort on gear that was far more cost prohibitive than the offerings today and with sometimes worse results. Such tools of today have also never been cheaper. The average price of software tools seems to be trending downwards.
They also denigrate companies like NI who offer an ecosystem of hardware and software products that easily integrate with each other for ease of flow and performance. Like that's a bad thing. This integration (when it works - and it does) is very much a desirable quality in music making tools. I don't see any downside to these type of products.
Perhaps there's a point to be made about the over-saturation of plugin developers dragging prices lower to the point where they cannot make a living. Some sort of a race to the bottom. But I don't see that being stated in this article. As soon as they start to build steam on these points they shift gears - without warning - to:
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POINT #2: Non-western music systems are not well-represented in these products.
This is valid. Few DAWs offer integration of non-western tuning systems. Those that do offer the feature require extra effort to work in compared to the "native" equal temperament tuning that the DAW is built for. I don't know why exactly this is. I'd certainly be open to this feature, but I suspect that integrating multiple tuning systems in an intuitive and easy manner in a DAW requires a lot of development effort for a feature that a majority of their user base may not be asking for. That said, I don't know what the numbers for users who desire something like this.
That said, they undermine their point when they go on to say:
<NI sells dozens of sample packs, including the problematic ‘Spotlight Collection,’ monetising instruments based on their vague traditional location (“East Asia,” “West Africa,” “Middle East”). By reducing their tonal complexities to the strict confines of the Western, equal-tempered piano keyboard, NI sustains what musicologist Philip Ewell describes as the white racial framing of musical understanding... Kontakt is a platform for neocolonial musical framing.>
As the owner of each of these products I don't see what their issue is. Both the East Asia and Middle East instrument packs feature options for at least 4-8 alternate tuning systems that can then be played on a piano-style MIDI keyboard or piano roll. What more do they want? If they want these tuning systems to be mapped onto something other than a western piano keyboard then it's up the musician to purchase a non-piano (micro-tonal) MIDI keyboard that will support the mapping. There's very little else they can do in this instance.