Did the covid pandemic help to produce more or better, fresher music?

Since the 2020 onset of the pandemic, I had to change aspects of my lifestyle and many plans — like most everyone else.  Although my 2020/21 music performances had to be canceled and I even moved my lectures online, I’ve had the opportunity to catch up on giving talks, interview and join panels during the past couple of years. The topics ranged from music production, sound synthesis, performance technology to the culture of music and sound, fan events, directions in film scoring and even representing my anti-AI principles at a prestigious audio panel for the Audio Engineering Society.

It’s great to talk at industry events and panels, but what I enjoy about “prosumer” audiences, up and coming music people, is their non-pretentious huger for knowledge and creatively interesting questions. A topic I spoke about for a small and intimate audience at the Silicon Valley Music Production Summit last year is a good example of how to avoid the same old formula questions and talk about some fresh ideas, uncensored by cultural expectations. Its high point was my compositional justification for considering a recent pop tune “better music” than one of Mozart’s well-known works.

Unlike the rest of the music-making community, I did not use the unexpectedly available home-bound time to “write a song a day”. I did not jump on fb/IG to offer music production workshops to the masses, even though, suddenly every other human with no real production experience became a “music producer” in 2020… Nor did I purchase production gear to upgrade my studio to “perfect my sound” during the downtime – apparently, everyone else did, as Sweetwater closed a year of record profits. I didn’t even finish my long-long due forgotten future: W2 album.

What I did instead was the opposite: I listened. let me explain.

“I had nothinig else to do under the lockdown, so I made tracks… lots of new tracks! I got many clicks so now I’m teaching other producers how to produce music… lots of it!”

Do we really need a few million new tracks every day?

It’s great that people now have very affordable tools to create music – the process should be certainly available for all to enjoy. But distributing all the “tracks” that most anyone now who knows how to use a computer can “produce” overnight, might not be what humanity needs. See, the problem is not the quantity, but the quality of the great majority of that huge quantity. Placing technology first and music second unsurprisingly results in very similar output from a diverse range of people, which usually lack authenticity and originality. I consider production mainly as packaging for musical ideas. Starting with the packaging (and even doing that mainly by copying the “experts” of packaging) will unlikely allow for injecting great content into the finished package after the fact. And, you know what tons of empty packaging is… trash. To me, this is a simple equation: quality and quantity are diametrically opposed concepts.

Lots of good music takes time

On top of the quantity issue, some things just take time; no pandemic can force us, at at least not directly, to be more productive at the same quality standards. I’m not questioning the production quality of a high-output “producer” (although with continuous production, dilution is bound to happen). Nor am I suggesting that good work has to take years. What I am suggesting is a balance between absorbing and expressing, like a good conversation. There must be some kind of emotional input in order for us to create an emotional output. The input can be a feeling, an event, a situation, whatever effects us. The output is what we express in our own voice, whether that be through music, painting or another art form. Processing too many emotions too quickly may simply not allow us to fully and deeply absorb them. Similarly, we can’t expect ourselves to create interesting content if we don’t have enough emotional input to begin with. Forcing this natural process of absorption-expression for the sake of higher productivity will inevitably produce more but shallower art.

I for sure would not be opposed to hearing fewer new releases but fresher, more original music. I well remember attending a platinum producers’ panel at a major audio convention. After talking about the old vs new in music production techniques for an hour, one of the more seasoned producers ended the panel with the rhetorical question: “But where is the music today!?”.

That was in 2012. Now, ten years later, the question is more relevant than ever.