An article that came out last night that I thought you all might enjoy:
Houston, TX actually has had a growth in pro studios. Some of the shoddy so-so operators disappeared.
Aren’t a lot of those statistics based on who you ask and how you count?
My first question would be how do we define a recording studio? Are we talking about little home operations or commercial studios? What about commercial quality studios in homes? What if the studio is a business, but is a private facility like mine? I don’t record bands, and have no intention of starting to so…so is this technically a studio? What if you own a radio station…with a vocal booth that records thing and broadcasts them? Many radio DJ’s record their programming then edit it…isn’t that close enough?
So if you qualify studios as a place where you record, you exclude mix engineers and nearly all mastering facilities. Because the very few mastering engineers have any interest in tracking musicians. But they’re still businesses that intuitively seem like they ought to be included in the ‘recording studio’ statistic.
Thoughts?
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Who knows, nowadays they can doctor a study every which way and make it sound legit. It looks like their research is flawed, but it is in leading publication, so majority of people read it and take it for the God’s honest truth.
There’s some truth to the article imo…but I do agree there’s a lot of distortion in the way it was presented. I find it interesting how major paradigm shifts can make an entire industry appear as though its dying when its really just evolving.
I look at it like this…and its just a one person me perspective. Analog recording is dying - nearly (if not completely) dead. But the big studio model is not…its narrowing, but its not dying. Dying to me entails that its going extinct and soon to be gone. I’m firmly convinced that the top tier of artists and their investors still need (and will continue to need) large production facilities and access to equipment that small and mid-sized studios can’t afford and don’t have the expertise to use. As far as music recording goes, are those facilities necessary? I have my opinions and I feel they are, but for everyone else I think that question is best left to the person to pays to record there. I’ve come to realize it’s not helping any of us to push my views onto others.
A quick thought to consider: it costs about $10m to build a single mixing room in a commercial quality sound stage. Thats only including the room and the monitors. There’s only a few of them left in the United States - they’re booked super heavily, and they’re insanely expensive to rent. But they serve a very distinct purpose in an audio industry that is not going to disappear. The financial metrics and staffing requirements make it outright impossible to migrate a facility like this to a home. So where do you go when you just put $150,000,000 into a movie and need your audio mixed?
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