by Paul D. Lehrman

Whatever happened to the democratization of music production? Wasn't that supposed to be here by now? And wasn't it supposed to be a good thing? Wasn't every musician going to be able to make records in his or her home, and weren't all of the giant record companies going to come crashing down in the wake of the home studio revolution and the Internet explosion?

In fact, some of it did happen the way we thought it would, but some of it didn't. I have a home studio, and I couldn't live without it. But the record companies are still out there, strong as ever. And you know something? I'm glad they are. We need them. But we need them to do a much better job than they're doing because the alternative could actually turn out to be worse.

The rest of this column, along with 56 more, is now available in The Insider Audio Bathroom Reader, published by Thomson Course Technology PTR.

Copyright ©2006 by Paul D. Lehrman