Music Production: 10 Years From Now – Part 2

…a continuation of Music Production: 10 Years From Now – Part 1

Streaming Media Changes “Ownership” to “Access”

We all know that the age of selling physical “copies” of music (such as CDs) is over. Now we are we are reaching the point where the era of downloading compressed audio formats like MP3s is headed the same way. Owning digital copies of content is becoming obsolete with the transition to streaming content delivery services (think Rhaposdy and Netflix-on-demand). When you subscribe to these services, you are paying for “access” to enjoy the content, without having to own it. With internet speeds increasing everyday and the explosion of mobile internet devices, streaming services will allow you to listen to the high-quality music you want anywhere without the inconvenience of having to transfer digital “copies” between devices or the added storage cost of “ownership.”

The importance of this shift is two-fold for the recording industry: First, it demonstrates the technical feasibility of massive audio/video data transfer in near-realtime, and second, it opens the door to the concept of media “access” which will result more collaboration and creative input into production projects, rather than being limited to individual digital copies. (More on the social nature of production in a moment).

A Big Leap in Audio Quality

Another big time advantage of streaming content is the inevitable increase in everyday music recording quality to 24bit/96khz and beyond. We can stream at much higher bandwidths than we used to, and because streaming audio dynamically adjusts based on bandwidth (as opposed to a set standard, like 16/44.1 on CDs), we can expect our finished recordings to finally reflect the high-fidelity our equipment is capable of producing. Say goodbye to MP3s and inferior standards of media ownership. Say hello to unlimited fidelity!

The End of Local Information Storage

People have been moving data off their personal computers and into the cloud for quite a while now. Photos, music, videos, personal information, and documents are all being trusted to the cloud. For most people, the benefits of instant access to their personal files from anywhere far outweigh the old concerns about privacy and data loss. Online storage has proven to be convenient, reliable, cheap, and in many ways safer than storage on your own computer.

The only real necessities left on your computer’s hard drive are the actual applications you use, and any proprietary data they create. But as I mentioned before, the software-as-a-service model is coming on quickly to change all of this. You wont have to host the majority of the applications you use from your own computer in the near future, because you will be able to access them all over the internet. When all of our data and applications are hosted in the cloud, we will only need the most basic internet enabled devices to use them.

And finally, that leads us to:

Full Production Inside the Cloud and The End of Native Based Recording

UNIVERSAL ACCESS: The advantages of cloud computing are many, but one of the most important is the ability access your work or content from any internet connected device, anywhere in the world. All of your recording software, including virtual instruments and 3rd party plug-ins will be online as an account, and not stored natively on your local machine. Your sessions will be available to any internet-enabled device. This will allow anyone with privileged access, from mixing engineers to artists to labels, the ability to instantly work on or hear the session from anywhere in the world, in real time, as if they were in the ‘studio’.

UNLIMITED PROCESSING: All of the DSP processing will also be done remotely, and will not be dependent on the machine you are controlling or viewing it from. You will have as much processing power and storage as you are willing to pay for. Run out of DSP for a session? Just bump up your subscription level, or pay for a one-time processing bump. Wanna try a new plug-in? Buy it or demo it immediately inside a session without even as much as tabbing to another browser window. Oh, and iLoks can suck it! Any purchases and authorizations will be linked to your subscriber account with full line-item billing and autopay options.

CONTINUALLY UPGRADED SOFTWARE: A major disadvantage with purchased software is that it will inevitably be eclipsed by better, more robust versions as soon as you open the box. If you don’t constantly buy new upgrades, you risk falling behind the industry curve and having compatibility issues with newer versions. Software-as-a-service makes this problem irrelevant as every update is automatic and covered by your subscription fees.

AUTOMATIC BACKUP: Every professional recording engineer knows that backing up your work is crucial. Systems crash, sessions get corrupted, and sometimes idiot interns just delete them entirely. [Or kick the drive over! Ed.] But regular backups are a pain. Online DAW sessions will be backed up instantaneously. This will get you the power to recall any session, in any state. No more searching through mountains of scratched DVD backups or rickety 13GB SCSI drives only to find that all your original audio files are missing. Plus, cloud-based DAWs will likely run Linux-based OSes, no more of this Mac/Windows instability.

NEW CONTROL PROTOCOL: There will be a new open source control surface protocol (to replace MIDI, HUI, and other proprietary languages) created specifically for the technological demands of web production. It will be extremely fast, comprehensive, and fully customizable. Control Surfaces and will barely resemble the analog console style controllers we have grown accustomed to. Devices like the Snyderphonics Manta will replace the old fader/knob/keyboard paradigm left over from the analog years.

EVOLVED PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENTS: Workflow will no longer be limited by the shortcomings of the analog mindset. As useful and versatile as the mixing console paradigm has been, it is not a superior digital mixing format.. Popular DAWs like Abelton Live are already redefining our conception of production environments. The cloud transition will lead us into an exciting world of new production and mixing concepts that we can’t even imagine at this point.

PREMIUM SERVICES: Still got a hard-on for outboard gear? Imagine this: A premium subscription package allows you to remotely patch your mix through hundreds of real outboard effects processors located across the country. It will be sent from the server to the hardware’s real location, converted to analog, run through the equipment, re-converted and sent back to your session’s server, all nearly instantaneously. You will have complete control over the hardware from your computer, and even see the unit from a live video feed, in real time, as you adjust and listen to it. Or, let’s say you want a classical piano part written for your latest song, but you can’t begin to compose or play one. Just pay a small fee to have one of the classically trained pianists on staff to join you in your session and perform on your song. What do you do if you’ve just been sent a horribly out-of-tune vocal track and you don’t have $400 to buy the super duper tuning program you need? Outsource it. There will literally be 1000s of experienced vocal tuning engineers available online who can do the work for you at a fraction of the cost of the plug-in, and in a fraction of the time it would have taken you.

SOCIAL MUSIC: Lastly, and perhaps even more exciting than any of the technological advancements I’ve mentioned, this cloud production environment will be ripe for social networking.The opportunities are literally endless but here I’ll list some of the awesome things you might do with social music networking in the future:

Join online collaboration sessions, sit in remotely on a session while your favorite engineer is mixing a single or your favorite producer is coaching a vocalist, get hooked up with new clients, produce and record songs with a band on the other side of the world, meet with labels about the artist you are currently producing, discover new distribution channels, share new instruments and sounds you create, trade virtual instruments and plug-ins with friends, customize your workflow environments, sell your instrumentals to other producers, take interactive classes on virtually any recording industry subject, and even create your own online “studio” with other engineers, songwriters, and producers that share your vision.

Get On or Get Out

It would behoove some of the notoriously stubborn DAW industry leaders (cough cough…Digidesign) to shift their development focus from native hardware and software to the software-as-a-service model as soon as possible. They probably dread having to give up on currently profitable hardware/software products, but they don’t have a choice.

As the producers and engineers from the analog era found out, the industry doesn’t stop because you’re comfortable where you are. And it’s not going to stop evolving for the current digital generation either. Adapt or die.