Is this a golden age for electronic musicians? *Poll*

[Hewitt Huntwork]

Until there is a cataclysmic event on Earth, technology will always be in a golden age. It will always be better than it was five minutes ago.

Culturally, however, this is an interesting time that I would not describe as a golden age. The way we consume music has become much more solitary - more like the way we consume books than like the way we watch movies. There has always been the solitary act of listening to an album and the communal act of going to shows, but the thing that seems so different these days is the inbetween act of listening to the radio or watching MTV. Even though these could be solitary pursuits, you could hang around the water cooler at work and ask, "did you see/hear this?" and the chances were that someone would have. But now that people get much more of their listening and watching done on a flexible schedule (or on demand), we can no longer take for granted that we're probably being exposed to the same media. So we no longer have that touchstone in culture. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, just that it has changed too quickly for us to be able to see the result.

[Tricky-Loops]

There will be an age where audio equipment (especially hardware) is getting more expensive because the prices for the primary materials will rise. Especially because the available amounts of crude oil (which is needed for plastic) will further decrease. There even may be new wars between countries because of crude oil and other primary materials. We will have to find alternative ways to fuel our cars and to heat (or cool) our flats and houses. We will have to find alternatives for plastic, too...

There are many difficulties to come in the foreseeable future. So let's celebrate this golden age as long as it's there.

[mellotronaut]

It seems to me that people used to do a lot more with a lot less.

+1,000,000,000

The crazy thing is: The more stuff (synths, effects etc.) I have, the less music I make actually.

how do you know?

we're flooded with tools and tracks, but it doesn't mean, there is no golden age right now. for me it is a golden age of electronic music, because i can record the stuff, i want to record and enjoy myself.

[dmbaer]

Until there is a cataclysmic event on Earth, technology will always be in a golden age. It will always be better than it was five minutes ago.

Very well put. I have sound production gear, in the form of software, on my computer that would have cost rather more than my entire net worth if this were 40 years ago. And there's every reason to expect that ten years from now my current setup will look primitive. IMO, for the home music producer the golden age started maybe ten years ago and things just keep getting more golden with each passing day.

[SODDI]

As an artform, it's decadent, overly conservative, sunk in a sonic and musical nostalgia.

[bluedad]

As far as I'm concerned it's a golden age. 40 yrs ago playing with an old Webcor tape recorder; 30 yrs ago a 4 track Fostex/Cutec; 25 yrs ago my first pc and trying to figure out DOS commands AND midi modes on a Yamaha FB01.
To have what we have now was beyond my wildest dreams back then..

[danbroad]

I vote yes... the kit available is better than ever before, available to more people at better prices than it ever has been. The means of recording it, sharing it and listening to it is better than it ever has been, too.

It's not the market's fault that free availability means the music is 99% drivel.

[Sendy]

It was the best of times, it was the woOWRI)RIWRI)F)OFw JUST KILL ME NOW!!¬!

Or to be more specific, we have a technological boon and a cultral defecit. In the 90's I remember listening to the Orb's Orbus Terrarum, Squarepusher, Aphex, Vibert, it was all very forward-thinking futuristic music with a human soul.

These days we seem to focus on the technical futurism but the soul is hard to find. There's too much focus on gear and not enough on the thought processes, colour, lore and stories behind the music. Less and less artists appear to have found a unique "voice". Have you noticed how the best bands and artists have a sort of common thread running through them, like each album is a chapter from a great story? In this age of mp3 singles and the death of the album format this focus on the big picture is gone, gone, gone. (woah-woaahh)

I can remember when Trance was a massive genre with alsorts of things going on. Trance was f**king cool in the 90's. My apologies if you like modern trance music, but this narrowing and multiplying of genres really annoys me. A genre these days is like a tight bandpass filter that lets through one solitary sine wave, whose volume and phase is wavering because it misses it's pals.

For a good case study on the downfall of electronic music, I give you urban music, and in particular, drum+bass. In the 90's urban music was my escape from mediocrity. If you'd told me in '95 that dillinja would be making "snares on 2+4" overly compressed clownstep I'd have laughed in your face. Guess who's laughing now? (Clue: it isn't me). How a producer can go from a vibe so funky and dynamic to something so static and just plain irritating is beyond me.

The one thing I can say, is that at least I can say the onus falls on me to make the music I want to hear. I may not do my job perfectly, but I try to do it uniquely.

[debra1rlo]

it's a great time for the tools, but this golden age has spawned a dearth of people with little creativity, only interested in the advances that the technology has provided as a means to an end (accolades, money, notoriety, etc)

[Sampleconstruct]

It's the golden age of mediocre-ness...

[DWB2]

I think that we've never had more potential to do great things - like someone said, given a computer and some speakers you can basically get a massive range of stuff (legitimately) for free - from easy to use synths and sequencers to beardy algorithmic madness.

But at the same time we've never had so many traps to stop us realizing that potential - if you can get bigged up on forums by loading up a pre-built dubstep drum loop and a wobble bass preset, or following a "how to make a minimal techno track" tutorial from the internet, why bother starting from first principles and seeing where you get to? If everyone on your favorite forum is talking about how to wring a bit more loudness out of your track with multiband compression, why bother flipping over rhythm and taking the chord progression into the outer limits? Why do anything when you can watch cat videos on youtube?

So yeah, best of times / worst of times, innit.

[D-Fusion]

I voted no but if you are doing this as a hobby then yes
The + side is that everyone is now able to create Music.

If you think about earning Money and do this for a living you are in the wrong business.
10-20Years ago it was possible but not anymore.

[Bronto Scorpio]

I don't think there is less good stuff, but surely a lot more crap. That's simply because it's gotten so easy to "make da phat beatz".

I don't really know if that's a bad thing though. A lot of people seem to have a lot of fun making those phaaaaat beatz uknowotimsayin'? Who am I to judge what's allowed and what not? People who produce this kind of stuff are rarely interested in music itself, it's more like a cultural/social thing for them.
I do think there is still a place for people with a real passion for music.

I keep finding great electronic music these days. Now I find it on Youtube, KVR and especially Muffwiggler instead of on compilations or stuff like that, but that doesn't have to be a bad thing either.

I was on a LAN party ages ago. We played counter strike and I was just having some fun while everyone else was dead serious about it (I never played CS before and after that). Everyone kept telling me how wrong I do everything, but somehow I had a lot of fun. That's pretty much the same situation.

Cheers
Dennis

[GeckoYamori]

I pretty much divide electronic music into 3 eras. The first era is when electronic music and synthesizers were purely something for academics who either invented the machines themselves or had the privileged access to them. The music was mostly very quirky and experimental, as many had this futuristic philosphy where they wanted to free themselves totally from the constraints of classical western music structures.

The second era begins towards the mid-to-late 70's and really gets started in the 80's, when electronic music leaves the laboratories and enters the studios, becoming accessible to curious, classically trained musicians. This is my personal "golden age" in terms of the cultural output with a strong melodic focus.

We are now in the third era where the means to create electronic music has become accessible to everyone, even the completely uninitiated with virtually no prior knowledge of music or sound theory. This development has gone hand-in-hand with the dawn of consumer priced home computers and their growth in power. Starting with the Commodore 64 and its built in sound chip, which any user could compose with.

[dalor]

Golden age for *CREATING* electronic music? Yes.

Golden age for making a full time *LIVING* of (any) music?

Electronic music was only accessible to the few who could afford the gear to create the "electronic music sound" spending minimum $10K and WAY beyond. Today this sound can be created by anyone with almost zero knowledge out of the box for a few hundred dollars (for the most part).