These days, social media runs the world. It is the artist’s greatest tool in promotion.
An individual can literally reach most of the world just by clicking the share button on Facebook. Musician communities like ReverbNation and Ourstage allow artists to directly interact with other artists and fans alike. Not to mention, the artist can connect with venues to set up shows and studios to set up recording sessions.
Musician communities have become a one stop shop for the tech savvy, self promoting artist!
Streaming is also easier and more wallet friendly than it ever has been. Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal all provide hi quality streaming, but Spotify takes the cake in my opinion. With the largest selection of totally free music, it has been hard for Apple and Tidal to compete. Even with the most popular commercial artist’s exclusive releases, Apple and Tidal just can’t keep up with Spotify.
The internet is by far the greatest tool invented for use by the artist, but let’s not forget the badass software and affordable gear that has been made available in recent years.
Condenser microphones, which are the industry standard for studio music production, have gotten simpler and far more affordable over the last decade. While there are still large differences in quality that are directly correlated with price, for about $200 an artist can buy a bargain preamplifier and high quality condenser microphone to do their own home recording. Before the 2000s, affordable home recording equipment was low quality and difficult to use at best. Now, some microphones are USB plug and play which literally allows the artist to record instantly with compatible recording software. It has become so easy that the music industry is flooded, but thats a convo for another post.
Audio recording software has also made huge strides in user friendliness and overall capability.
Avid Pro Tools, the industry standard for recording and mixing audio, is basic enough for a brand new user to sit down and record on the spot. Obviously there are intricacies and nuances about mixing and audio engineering that can’t be translated into a one push button, but my point is almost anyone with minimum computer savvy can use Pro Tools in its most basic functions. Also, with the insane amount of plug ins and effects, achieving the perfect reverby auto-tune vocals is easier than ever.
With all of these emerging EDM artists, beat sequencing programs like FL Studio have seen major improvements. The newest version of FL Studio even got a facelift that makes it more realistic in terms of setting up effects and plug ins. FL Studio adopted an interface similar to Reason where it looks like an actual mixer rack in a studio. FL Studio also upped their user friendliness while adding to the overall capabilities, allowing a total of 10 effect slots for each mixer track compared to its previous total of 8!
It is definitely to the artist’s advantage that these awesome software companies are producing easy to use, but high quality and affordable software programs. We can thank the tech nerds for that one!