Ron Thal: alternative matter... three part interview

"Haha, I could talk all day about this. The thing is that I’m not talking about the METALLICA's and U2’s of this world, but about guys who are trying to get their first bands together and getting their music out there. It’s about delivering the music to people in the best possible way and have a future in doing that. It’s geared towards those kind of people. Where to begin? It’s really simple. Fifteen years ago when I started putting out albums you still had all the big gatekeepers like labels and distro. There was a lot of money being allocated to promote albums and making people aware of their existence. This was before the time the internet got big. The only way to do it was through hellishly expensive ads in magazines and you didn’t get the worldwide coverage you get nowadays because of internet. If you wanted to get some visibility in a record store you had to pay 500 dollars each month on one location to have it in the listening booth. That really adds up and could wipe you out. The distro would be waiting on getting paid from the stores and it would hold up paying the label, and after all the expenses for recording and promo you wouldn’t see a dime as an artist. That happened to me several times. A label wouldn’t do a lot of promotion and they wouldn’t help set up a tour, and would say I owed them twenty grand. I was busting my balls making albums and not making a dime in return. I wasn’t in it for the money, but you still need to pay your bills. You’re putting all of your time in but it’s not putting food on the table. How are you supposed to live?"

...

eah, that’s a whole other point to contend with. The income from music is a tenth of what it was. Big studios started to experience it when home computers started to get better and better. Nowadays you can make a record on your laptop. You don’t have to buy studio time and you can do it yourself. You don’t need a photography darkroom anymore, because you have a digital camera and Photoshop. As a producer you don’t get 50,000 dollars anymore to work on an album, the numbers aren’t as high and the expenses aren’t as big. The ratios may be the same, just the proportions have shrunk. So now you’d produce that same album for 5,000 dollars. That’s reasonable because that’s the amount of money that is moved around and people aren’t making as much. Also because of all that your income isn’t as much in the very end. There was a time where making music was the nucleus and all the merch and promotion was based around that. That has changed now, everything orbits around you as an artist and as a human being from my point of view. Connecting to the artist is now the nucleus and recording music has become one of the aspects of what an artist does, like touring and whatnot. Hopefully people are understanding enough to grasp that artists are spending money to do all these things and they need to be supported in order to keep doing it.

It does take a lot of the magic away of being a musician…

part 1
part 2
part 3

Comments