About 66 million years ago dinosaurs were battling it out on earth to prove who was the biggest and the best. Some suggest it was the Tyrannosaurus Rex, or ‘King Lizard’ for short. Even if he wasn’t the best he was perhaps the best known from around 700 different species of dinosaurs that have existed on earth.

So, all these dinosaurs are battling it out to be the biggest and the best, Caveman monthly had just done a survey of Best Dinosaurs and T Rex was the clear winner, although some argued that the Triceratops was better. There were huge arguments in the caveman forums about it, even more amongst the membership of the CES, the Caveman Eating Society, it seemed to be a matter of endless debate.

Then BANG! It was all over. An impact event wiped them all out in an instant. Which dinosaur was the biggest or the best didn’t matter anymore, they were gone.

I’m guessing some of you are wondering what the f*ck does this have to do with recording?

It’s simple, all industries go through impact events and some make a bigger difference than others.

Let’s bring things a bit more up to date. Around 1450 Johannes Gutenberg unveiled his printing press. Until the invention of the printing press manuscripts were largely hand-written. Although some form of printing had been invented in China and Korea before, Gutenberg’s press was the one to make the greatest impact. Another technological impact event. Until Gutenberg’s printing press, literacy was poor amongst the general populous, facts were shared by word of mouth, which as you can imagine meant facts became clouded as they were passed on. Of course some things were written down, but by hand, which meant a tiny proportion of society were the gate-keepers of knowledge. This was over, printing meant that both reading and knowledge were now democratised.

OK, let’s get even more up to date. By the 1990s and early 2000s Nokia owned much of the mobile phone market. At one point there was a Nokia phone in almost every pocket on the planet, they were unstoppable.

Then one day a man famous for making computers pulled a glass phone out of his pocket and BOOM! Another impact event.

The Future Of Music And Audio Production

Where is all the leading? It’s simply this, the longer an audio technology continues, the older it gets, and inevitably the closer we get to an impact event.

One might argue that the DAW was such an event? But was it? What the DAW did was modernise the professional audio recording industry. The tape became a hard drive and the mixer became a screen and mouse. On the whole it’s still the same people doing the job, but with different tools. At best one could describe the DAW as a shake-up, but not an impact event. The audio recording equivalent of movable type in the printing world.

A better case for an impact event in the recording world would be the invention of the Portastudio and other low cost tools that meant people who used to go into big studios could now do it at home. In some ways the Portastudio had a greater impact on recording studios as we saw more and more conventional studios go out of business. The Portastudio happened in the early 1980s, over 40 years ago, so one could suggest we are due another impact event soon.

Our best guess is the next asteroid strike on our industry will be around the whole world of DAW and associated software recording technologies. Cast your mind back to the dinosaur analogy at the start of this article… replace the whole best dinosaur narrative for best DAW and you can see how these things play out. Dinosaurs…BOOM, written word… BOOM, mobile phones… BOOM. The impact events hit when we least expect and before we know it, life as we knew it is changed.

Which begs the question, has the DAW concept reached its natural conclusion? There’s a lot of tinkering around the edges that goes on in the DAW world, but in many cases the advancements are little more than the audio world equivalent of offering a hand’s free phone connection, or satellite navigation to a car owner. It might make things easier, but the car is still intrinsically doing the same job.

I’d like to suggest there’s another impact event coming. Not today, not this week, or even this month, but in the next ten years I’m not sure the majority of people who want to make music will be using a DAW.

If You Could Start Over…

Let me ask you this question, if you were starting all over again and wanted to record and share your music, would you choose a DAW? I asked around the team, many of us said no.

DAWs aren’t easy to use, in fact in many cases they cause more trouble than they solve for a creative trying to get their ideas down. You have to find a computer that will work, choose some software, get an audio interface and learn a ton of stuff… then you can record your song. It makes the whole Portastudio concept seem incredibly attractive. I’ve written about this on other occasions, you can read about that in my article Has The Home Studio Dream Become A Nightmare? I’ve also written about it in my article 4 Things I Hate About Home Music Production

Now this is a moment when I know I’m going to have a few professional audio equivalents of monks writing on vellum getting hot under the collar. You see, the minute we start to consider making a process easier you get a whole bunch of people thinking ‘that’s my job gone!’ Or ‘this is dumbing down and that’s a bad thing!’ Often the people most threatened by technological advancements are the gate keepers of an industry, who in their minds have written an invisible line to the rest of the world that says AUTHORISED PEOPLE ONLY, DO NOT CROSS!

There’s nothing new about this, publishers got hot under the collar when blogging became a thing. I recall sitting at a press event for Avid years ago and was made to feel very uncomfortable by the real journalists in the room. One, in fact, tried to make me look stupid in front of the rest of the room. His publication no longer exists, in fact he may have even left the industry. I take no pleasure in this, but it is a sobering lesson to all of us who try to maintain the status quo and ignore the impending impact. It’s worth watching the movie Don’t Look Up, it’s a sobering lesson even if the impact event isn’t an asteroid.

Sign Of The Times

The signs seems clear, technology is moving to a new place that means those who want to create, mix, master and release their music don’t want all the paraphernalia often associated with computer based recording. More solutions are appearing that mean the DAW et al may not be the future of making and releasing music for the vast majority.

Sure there will still be some using DAWs and conventional recording methods, some still use tape machines. I say that not as a judgement but a matter of fact. Some will still use professional studios, they are going nowhere. In some ways it’s the next layer down who should be worried.

Some brands are already getting ready for it, brands that have spent over 20 years working on DAWs and plugins. I’ve spoken with some of them, they can see there’s many who want to be creative but see the DAW/plugin thing as a turn-off. The potential market for these new solutions is huge compared to the size of the industry we belong to.

A Faster Horse?

A lot of us are waiting for a faster horse when someone is about to invent the motor car.

At some point (and sooner than we think), someone is going to do for music making what the smart phone has done for photography… it’s only a matter of time. The most sobering part of the smart phone photography lesson is this, it wasn’t a camera brand like Nikon, Canon or Pentax who did it, it was a mobile phone brand. Do people still buy DSLR cameras? Yes, but the number has dropped like a stone in just over a decade. According to Statista;

“The best camera is the one that’s with you”. This phrase, coined by the award-winning photographer Chase Jarvis, probably best describes the impact that smartphone cameras had and still have on the world of photography. The cameras built into our phones may still be inferior to dedicated digital cameras in general and SLR cameras in particular, but they are constantly getting closer and they have the priceless advantage of always being within reach.

When the first touchscreen smartphones made waves in 2007 and 2008, the camera industry was doing very well. In 2008, members of the CIPA, an association of the world’s most renowned camera makers, shipped almost 120 million digital cameras and probably didn’t worry too much about the upcoming competition. Back then, smartphone cameras were no match in terms of image quality and photo apps such as Instagram or Snapchat hadn’t been invented yet.

12 years later, the situation of the camera industry looks very different. Not only do most people always have their smartphone with them, but the lenses and sensors built into mobile phones are getting better and better. Having raced to ever-higher megapixel counts in the early years of the smartphone boom, recent developments have focused on improving image depth and performance in low-light conditions, both areas in which the difference between smartphones and dedicated cameras used to be most obvious. As our chart illustrates, global camera shipments by CITA members dropped by more than 80 percent since peaking in 2010. Last year, the world's largest camera makers shipped 15.2 million units, the lowest number of digital cameras since 2001 and the lowest number of cameras per se since the early 1980s.”

If the next music technology revolution has the same kind of impact as the smart phone camera then we may see a similar decline in purchases of conventional recording equipment. Many of those purchasing DAWs, plugins, and hardware are the music making equivalent of those who buy a top end DSLR camera and a ton of lenses to take a few family snaps and some pictures of the dog. They end up with an over engineered and complicated solution for their needs.

If you are wondering why some pro-audio brands seem to be ‘dumbing down’ their products, there’s a simple reason, they are preparing for the next impact event. They are making products for the next generation of music and film makers. Even more, it’s worth noting that the pro-audio industry is tiny in comparison to the new potential markets.

Right now a lot of the technology is appearing in things like software for video and podcasts, just check out the Descript video below to see the kind of magic that’s already happening. Now consider that a decade in technical innovation is like a millennia in some other sectors. Then imagine all the ways AI and other technology could be used to record, edit, mix and distribute music…

A relevant example here is when Meta, owners of Facebook acquired Accusonus. When companies like Meta, Facebook’s parent company shell out around €100m to acquire an audio plugin brand, which to be frank isn’t even close to being the biggest player in our space, then you know they are making a play for music creators. Companies like Meta have deep pockets, smart developers and a platform to exploit the technology on. They can build an end-end-end music creation and distribution platform.

You may be thinking ‘what the hell could Facebook do to disrupt the audio industry?” Just imagine all the people using Nokia phones who thought the same about Apple. One minute Nokia own the mobile phone industry and then BOOM!

If Apple can build a phone to disrupt both the mobile phone and camera industry, then there’s nothing stopping someone in tech doing the same for music creation.

We’ve had several decades of BETTER and CHEAPER in our industry, I suggest we get ready for a SIMPLER and LEANER revolution in music and audio recording. Just like a meteor strike, ignoring it or complaining about it won’t stop it happening.

Is this the end of professional music and post studios? Not at all, but if you’re sitting in the middle ground and make money from music creation then you would be foolish to ignore this, I predict this is the area most likely to be impacted by the disruptive ideas that will emerge. Expect some brands in our industry to head up to cater for the top professionals, or down to enable the next generation of music makers to do their thing.

Having spent a larger part of 40 years in the world of music and audio technology, I get a sense of things shifting. Perhaps I’m wrong and wildly off the mark… or perhaps I’m right? Only time will tell.

Discuss.