Dolby Atmos seems to be the thing everyone is talking about. It’s a fantastic technology that’s not only making waves in post-production but now in music production as well. With big brands like Apple getting behind Dolby Atmos with Spatial Audio, things will get even more exciting in the coming weeks, months, and years.

The Atmos Opportunity

Speak to top mixers and many are considering the investment into Dolby Atmos. It’s not cheap, it takes more gear and time to learn how to do it properly. Speak to anyone already working on Atmos remixes and they’ll tell you that it’s not easy, it certainly not fast. It’s not a case of just pushing an Atmos button on a plugin and hey presto, it’s done.

Some think Apple has a magic algorithm doing the work on remixing legacy content, from early feedback of the demo tracks, for some it sounds like it too. We asked some of our team to take a listen to some of the example tracks Apple have pushed and we got mixed opinions on them, you can read that in our article Apple Spatial Audio - Is It All Hype?

Reid Caulfield wrote in detail about the possible benefits, here’s a summary of that article;

“From the conversations I’ve seen swirling around just over the last few days immediately following Apple’s release of Spatial Audio, I can tell you that everyone - the smartest sound engineers on the planet, actually - are running around trying to figure it out.

So while this is a very exciting time in the professional sound industry, it might be wise not to follow the Yellow Brick Road all the way to The Emerald City just yet. As a technical exercise, yes, let’s figure it all out. But as a new business sector or business model, don’t put all of your dogs into this bicycle’s basket, hoping that you’ll be able to convince the gatekeepers that they should foot the bill for it all. You can’t, and they won’t. Not again.”

Read the entire article Apple Spatial Audio - Who Will Benefit?

The Elephant In The Room

Let’s get down to the big problem with Dolby Atmos, which seems to be even more of a problem when it comes to music.

Engineers and mixers are already reporting that they are being asked to do either new mixes or remixes that include Atmos. The labels are falling over themselves to get a chunk of the Atmos pie, there’s a lot of new music and even more legacy content they can repackage and resell.

Great, so what’s the problem?

Some clients, including labels, are expecting professional mixers to do it as part of the stereo mix gig, in other words, deliver an Atmos Mix for free.

Yes, read that again… mixing for free. You can imagine the lines; ‘can we do a test mix on this one?’ or ‘this is a loss leader for us, but support us now and you’ll be the first person we call when we need more doing.’

Atmos may be new, but the lines trotted out by those trying to get something for nothing are as old as the hills, and unfortunately very familiar to anyone working in audio post-production.

Atmos Mixes Need Paying For - Let’s Make A Stand

It’s essential that from day one the mixing community make it clear that Atmos comes at a cost, and that cost isn’t cheap. As we’ve already said, the investment into Atmos is considerable both in terms of money and time, as we lay out in our article Dolby Atmos - What Hardware And Software Do You Need To Work In Atmos? As a result, we strongly recommend that you don’t do that if you intend to throw it in as part of a stereo mix.

Yet again it seems that the music production community is being exploited while big corporations make a fortune. Atmos is a fantastic creative opportunity that Dolby has developed for us to add value to our work.

Let’s work together as a professional community to make sure we’re not the ones left picking up the bill while others benefit. That’s not an opportunity, that’s a scam!