This is just a one-time reminder that this whole magilla is about one kind of music: the recorded, mass-produced consumer object.
Although it may seem large and important due to its ubiquity and market value, there's really much more to music than this. Music can sound good and be valuable 100% live with no mics, outdoors with no special architecture. The mastering engineering in the article espouses the virtue of unique equipment, but in a live band, nearly every instrument and every performance quickly becomes a unique one.
Ask yourself, who does it really serve, to experience music as a lithographic impression rather than a unique experience? I'm not even arguing about musician's pay or anything like that. I'm talking about qualia of richness: diversity, local character, dynamic range, interplay with your mood, involvement, movement.
My comment here is really to just break up the spontaneous hierarchy of dollars + equipment + mystery -> ideal studio product. Now that technology has empowered us all to make more music faster on our own I feel it's especially important to ditch the last century's mindsets of scarcity and monoculture with respect to music.
Although it may seem large and important due to its ubiquity and market value, there's really much more to music than this. Music can sound good and be valuable 100% live with no mics, outdoors with no special architecture. The mastering engineering in the article espouses the virtue of unique equipment, but in a live band, nearly every instrument and every performance quickly becomes a unique one.
Ask yourself, who does it really serve, to experience music as a lithographic impression rather than a unique experience? I'm not even arguing about musician's pay or anything like that. I'm talking about qualia of richness: diversity, local character, dynamic range, interplay with your mood, involvement, movement.
My comment here is really to just break up the spontaneous hierarchy of dollars + equipment + mystery -> ideal studio product. Now that technology has empowered us all to make more music faster on our own I feel it's especially important to ditch the last century's mindsets of scarcity and monoculture with respect to music.