I was traveling this weekend, and picked up a copy of Bill McKibben’s book “Deep Economy” before my flight out of Logan. McKibben writes a lot about the idea of sustainability, often with a perspective geared toward energy use or food production. But the blurb on the book jacket caught my attention because it said he was trying to spin these ideas a little wider, claiming that sustainability could make sense not just for the environment, but for other economic models too. “Like music?!?!”, I thought? Certainly the old major label system was not sustainable, and has stalled in a big way. Sure enough, there were a few pages in there that I thought were great.
You can make a strong economic argument, even in conventional terms, for more localized economies… Tangible commodities such as timber and apples are not the only ones that might be localized. Take entertainment, for instance. During almost all of human history, people provided it for themselves: music (like food) was something you produced, and the pleasure was as much in the production as the consumption. With the advent of recording, and then of broadcasting, all that changed; the new technologies allowed us to be more efficient and single out the best musicians and let everyone else listen to them simultaneously, much as factory farming allowed 1 percent of Americans to feed the rest of us. We began to take it for granted that music came from somewhere else: Tin Pan Alley, Hollywood, Nashville. Now, of course, new technology is beginning to undermine that century-old system: file-sharing allows listeners to, in essence, wander onto the big farmer’s fields and glean what they like. The recording industry’s short-term solution was to sue file sharers, and the slightly longer-term fix was to sell their music over the Web; if they can’t protect the profit margin, they argue, there will be a “reduction in creative activity” because without the possibility of growing rich, fewer people will write songs.
Perhaps. But people wrote songs for millennia before they had any chance of making big money at it. At most, you could make a decent living as a wandering bard – a profession that seems to be coming back into style. The New York Times rock critic Jon Pareles wrote recently that while “selling pop music on expensively produced and promoted CD’s is a paradigm under siege,” “jam bands” in the tradition of the Grateful Dead and Phish ‘have flourished as concert mainstays and as an alternative to canned music,” and in the process bring “music’s ancient business model – the roving troubadour – to the interconnected modern world.” Imagine, he says, “current pop turned inside out. Playing concerts would be a living rather than a promotional tool, bands would take music chances nightly, wardrobe would be an afterthought… Music’s past would be a foundation rather than a scrap heap.” Such changes aren’t only only taking place in America. In England, government figures showed “a live music renaissance underway across the country,” with half of pubs, clubs, and restaurants featuring at least occasional live acts. Bands still sell recordings, but more and more, they sell them to the people who come to the shows, audiences that are interested in a shared community at least as much as virtuosity.
It’s as if musicians were suddenly, like the new wave of farmers, able to grow smaller quantities of more interesting crops and find reasonable profitable markets for them. The live shows that provide more of their revenue are the equivalent of farmer’s markets, places that customers love not only for the product, but for the experience. No one gets superrich, a la Mariah Carey or Archers Daniels Midland or Exxon Mobil; but plenty more people get to do something lovely, whether it’s grow berries for their neighbors or write songs for their region. This parallel musical universe may not replace the centralized global one, but it’s clearly gaining. How far might it go? Here’s a statistic that gives some small indication: in 1900, in the state of Iowa alone, which was then crowded with small farmers, there were also thirteen hundred local opera houses, all of them hosting concerts. “Thousands of tenors,” writes Robert Frank, “earned adequate, if modest, livings performing before live audiences”.
So why does all this matter to Streetlight Sound? Well, I’ve been thinking lots about ways I can use my little studio to better serve the musician community in Boston. The endeavor of recording music has changed more in the past 10 years than in the whole 100-year past that preceded it. As a producer, as a studio owner, and as a musician, I’m dedicated to being part of a new model that allows songwriters and singers to create a decent living for themselves, and to provide a hungry listeners with music that speaks to their lives. I don’t want to say too much now, but I’m really excited about some things that are on the horizon for Streetlight Sound. Stay tuned!
A year ago, I started work on what David Wax and I both thought would be a demo. But the project gathered steam, several sessions ensued, and low and behold, a record was born! I engineered basics as well as mandolin, dobro, fiddle, and vocal overdubs at Streetlight Sound. Then the project was sent down to Springfield, MO for a few more overdubs and mixing.
Check out the review below for Iron City’s release “Put The Flavor On It”, recorded at Streetlight Sound in June ‘08.
My buddy Adam Ollendorff, from Nashville, TN, just sent me some sweeeet dobro and pedal steel parts for two songs I’m working on. I love the sound of both these instruments and could listen to Adam play ‘em all day. Check out the two snippets below to hear some of his playing!
There’s a Leslie 16 at the studio nowdays, and I used it today to re-amp some organ samples for the Medicine Line’s track “She’s Almost”. I also re-amped another organ sound through the Fender Vibro-Champ that you can see in the back of this picture. They ended up sounding different enough that I used both of them in the mix. Check it out on the second verse – Leslie is stereo left, Vibrochamp stereo right.