love/hate relationship with music business

[analogica]

sometimes i wish i liked to be doctor, or a journalist or a restaurant manager or whatever different from what i am.

I love music, ive been here for so long...reading and talking about a band, working in a festival, being the runner of succesfull bands, rehearsing, recording, soldering a comp, playing gigs...I have no other life.

like a lot engineers im here first because i like music and i like to play, so thats the thing i want to record with my mics, but it seems to be IMPOSIBLE.

People here(south Europe-north Africa) always work with friends, you have to have contacts in hell, thats true,but you dont have to be a real friend of your clients, do you???....here you have to follow people, and be a cool guy, and all that shit....thats something I hate.

And is not so important to work well, have good skills, have a nice gear, etcetc...the only thing is to be a "cool" person, do you feel the same in your countries???

Another problem is people write and play good music, or at least not to bad...but theres nothing more than demo stuff, so its really hard to earn a little money.

...So Im thinking about a plan B,

-How many of you record and edit something other than music???
(jingles, radio spots, video edition, audio books, different languages books or dvds, dubbing, voices for elevators etc etc etc....)

-Its a hard business??? ,its a safer way to live???

I have a real good gear maybe more than you need for those recordings,
and Im planing to go out of here, maybe glasgow, maybe london, or berlin or stockholm...it should be really hard without contacts but im sure not as ****ed as here is.

i hope to be lucky...

[s2_Audio]

I offer you this raw unedited section from my book. You touch many areas of my heart with your post. I could take a lot of your time addressing them. I hope this abstract (it's who I am) helps in some way to answer some question you have posted:

I offer the story of a studio owner who purchased a previously owned A line recording console for an addition to his existing studio. He has one room operating and taking booked time. He wanted to build a smaller room to accommodate his growing number of recording students while still offering them the opportunity to get hands on experience operating a SSL console similar to the one residing in his main room. It was close to a hundred thousand dollar investment for this owner in the console alone. In his market he has to be dynamic in his rate structure in order to compete with surrounding studios who allegedly glean their income from sources outside of the recording studio business. This allows those studios to book their time for an hourly rate unfair to similar studios in the surrounding area by offering shoppers access to high dollar recording equipment for a low dollar fee. To put it in account language; … in an equal competition level environment if the areas surrounding studios compete by adjusting their rate structure below what is fiscally responsible for their business in hopes of future market conversion their ROI will rapidly become poor if not catastrophic. Any venture capital invested in such a market place would be risky at best.

Standing among saw horses, wire troughs, and the smell of a new hardwood floor going in I said, “…and the real drag is you have to spend all this money to chase a rate structure, driven by someone who doesn’t need to book time, for musicians who will take their sweet time to pay you”. I pointed to the saw horses and told him I could walk down to my car, grab my laptop, set it up on those saw horses and with a set of small self-powered speakers and internet access I could book a post audio session for one hundred dollars an hour more than his big room can downstairs for people who will never show up to the session and will happily pay their bill within thirty days. I sheepishly commented with something to the fact that he had to go to all these lengths just to satisfy our need to be impressed with mass and the appearance of a technical complexity associated with it. It is what recording consoles are all about and most likely why, after thirty years as a friend, it was the first time he has ever ‘bum rushed’ me out of this facility


Scott Spain

[analogica]

everyone record just music in here????

who do something different???

did you buy your gear for music stuff and you ended up doing something else???

And can u live by doing that????

[nukmusic]

There are pros and cons with any profession. Some a little more than others. Just the way life works. I think its a good thing for everyone to evaluate themselves from time to time. Hopefully the good outweighs the bad. If not, there's nothing wrong with having a PLAN B.