The Cost of Music: Has Digitization Made Copyright Obsolete?

Sean A. Pager* & Eric Priest**

Download a PDF version of this article here.

Commentators have repeatedly claimed that digital technologies render producers and recording engineers effectively obsolete. Supposedly, any DIY musician with a laptop and GarageBand can make home recordings that sound just as good as professionals in a high-end studio. The result is a dramatic reduction in the cost of music and the barriers to entry. As artists increasingly record and release new tracks entirely on their own, commentators hail the democratization of the music industry.

Copyright skeptics have invoked democratization claims to further their own agenda: They argue that because digital democratization has eviscerated music production costs, artists no longer need copyright protection to recoup their up-front investment. As such, sound recording copyrights may no longer be justified.

Our Article examines the reality underlying such democratization claims. Harnessing both quantitative and qualitative data, we shed empirical light on a debate hitherto fueled by theory and anecdotes. Our findings call into question the commercial viability of DIY music. We show that instances of genuine DIY music gaining widespread popularity remain rare—roughly 1% of music appearing in the top 200 weekly charts is self-produced by artists.

Our Article also provides a qualitative context to explain why DIY recordings have failed to gain traction on commercial charts. Drawing on extensive interviews with music industry insiders, we delve into the complexities of the music recording process and explore the hidden pitfalls that hold DIY artists back. Moreover, contrary to the claims of democratization evangelists, we show that the time and costs required to produce commercially competitive music have not have significantly changed in the digital age. Our findings strongly suggest that copyright skeptics have overstated their case: The rationale for the sound recording copyrights in the digital age remain fundamentally intact.

Introduction

They say one great song can change the world. But has technology changed the way great songs are made? Commentators present self-made superstars such as Justin Bieber and Lil Nas X as harbingers of a digital revolution: They claim a DIY musician with a laptop and GarageBand can now make home recordings that sound just as good as professionals working in a high-end studio. Bypassing industry gatekeepers will supposedly allow better music to be made at a much lower cost. As entry barriers vanish and costs plummet, many predict the music industry as we know it will be radically democratized.¹

This democratization of creativity has significant implications for copyright policy. Copyright skeptics argue that technology has largely eliminated the costs of producing and distributing new works. As such, we no longer need copyrights to recoup such up-front investments.² This Article probes the reality behind such claims.

Digital democratization’s premises remain more asserted than proven. By subjecting its claims to empirical scrutiny, this Article fills a vital gap in this literature. In particular, we harness novel quantitative and qualitative data to assess the extent to which digitally empowered artists can self-produce music that is commercially competitive.³

Democratization proponents often invoke viral success stories. Consider the meteoric rise of Oliver Anthony’s country-folk single, “Rich Men North of Richmond” to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 charts in August 2023.⁴ It was the first recording ever to debut at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 by an artist without any prior chart history.⁵ Instead of following the conventional path of seeking a record label deal and harnessing the content industry’s support, Anthony rocketed straight to the top of the charts seemingly all on his own.⁶ Some saw his success as a “repudiation of mainstream gatekeepers.”⁷

Anthony’s account of working class struggles against a nefarious cabal clearly struck a chord with listeners.⁸ The song’s chronicle of oppression could double as a metaphor for musicians fighting against record label exploitation. On this score, Anthony’s breakout success itself provided powerful inspiration that testifies to the power of social media to drive viral hits.⁹ Anthony’s backwoods production contributed to the track’s grassroots appeal, and eschewing a label deal enhanced his bottom-line earnings.¹⁰ Does “Rich Men” augur a future of DIY music production—a world in which the recording industry is rendered obsolete?

This raises the question: Is “Rich Men” an exemplar or an outlier? To be sure, there is an abundance of DIY music tracks being released via online platforms. In this sense, music production has been democratized, and digital technologies have unquestionably fueled this transformation. However, the extent to which such home-grown productions can compete effectively for mass audiences remains unclear. Techno-evangelists and copy-skeptics claim that viral hits such as “Rich Men” represent an emerging paradigm. Yet, how often do DIY tracks actually make it onto the top of the charts?

To answer, we collected data from popular music charts such as the Billboard Hot 100, Spotify, and other sources. Our data shows that instances of genuine DIY creativity making it onto the charts are extremely rare—less than 1% of top 100 tracks charting are DIY productions. These findings suggest that Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men” is indeed an outlier. In fact, the DIY bona fides of Oliver Anthony’s track are themselves questionable.¹¹

What about the claim that the empowering potential of digital technologies has led to drastic reductions in the costs of recording commercially successful music? Presumably, if DIY tools were so effective and easy to use, no one would pay for recording studios or professional assistance. And if digital technologies really yielded dramatic time-savings compared to analog recording techniques, those who did seek professional studio assistance would expect to pay less and get quicker results. We explored these propositions through qualitative interviews with recording professionals and other industry experts.¹²

These interviews have furnished objective data on the time and costs required to make high quality records—which turn out not to have declined as dramatically as commentators claim.¹³ To provide context for these findings, we explored the added value that recording professionals bring to the creative process and sought to understand why a DIY-inclined artist might—or might not—choose to seek professional assistance.¹⁴ The results help to explain why DIY production has failed to gain traction on commercial charts. Finally, we explored the potential for artificial intelligence-based automated recording tools to accelerate the disintermediation and democratization of music.¹⁵ Here too, the hype does not measure up to current reality.

Collectively, our research suggests that the copy-skeptics have significantly overstated their case. The democratization of content creation has made only limited inroads into the process by which commercially viable music is recorded, mixed, and mastered. Most artists still benefit from professional assistance and struggle to produce high quality recordings on their own.¹⁶ Nor is AI necessarily the game changer that some believe.¹⁷ Accordingly, the rationale for copyright as a mechanism to underwrite investment in socially valuable music remains essentially intact in the digital age.

The remainder of this Article proceeds as follows. Part I discusses how digital democratization claims challenge the rationale for copyright and specifically undermine the justification for copyright in sound recordings. Part I concludes, however, by observing that democratization claims remain rooted in anecdotes rather than hard data.

Part II-A addresses this gap empirically by assessing the extent to which music recorded without the aid of outside professionals appears on commercial music charts. Our examination of popular music charting from 2020 to 2023 reveals a striking absence of such “democratized” music: a mere 1% of the 766 unique tracks we examined represent plausibly DIY recordings. The much-heralded digital revolution remains nowhere in sight.

Parts II-B & C then explain why music charts represent a measure of popular taste and describe the increasingly daunting entry barriers that upstart musicians must struggle to overcome. Finally, Part II-D considers the extent to which the marketing clout of major record labels accounts for the edge enjoyed by professional studio recordings in our data. We present further data showing that label involvement does not provide a complete explanation: Music released by indie artists operating outside the major labels regularly makes its way onto the charts, including self-released tracks. However, such indie hits are overwhelmingly recorded with professional assistance. In other words, label involvement matters less than having professional-quality recordings.

Part III then turns to qualitative data to contextualize our quantitative results. Interviews with industry professionals delve into the complexities of the music recording process and reveal the many pitfalls that home recordists face. Given such challenges, the failure of DIY musicians to record commercial hits should not surprise us. Our findings also establish that, contrary to repeated claims by copyright skeptics, digital technologies have not fundamentally altered the cost of producing commercial-caliber music. Indeed, making a commercially competitive album still typically costs tens of thousands of dollars.¹⁸ In short, the promises of digital democratization remain largely unfulfilled.

Part Four concludes.

I. Copyright Policy Context

A. Traditional Rationale

Copyright protection in the United States is traditionally justified under an incentive rationale. The goal is to incentivize the creation and dissemination of original works of authorship.¹⁹ The exclusive rights that copyright confers encourage both authors and industry intermediaries to invest in producing and commercializing creative works by allowing them to recoup the often-substantial up-front costs entailed.²⁰ As such, copyright protection has long been seen as a vital lynchpin underpinning creative content industries.²¹

B. Digital Democratization

In recent years, the incentive rationale for copyright has been challenged by skeptics. Copy-skeptics and techno-evangelists have advanced a countervailing narrative of “digital democratization.”²² The democratization narrative hails the liberation of creators from dependence on content industry intermediaries through the empowering potential of digital technology. Instead of relying on publishers, record labels, and film studios, DIY creators can produce content easily and inexpensively on their laptops or phones.²³ With generative AI, a few word prompts can generate a fully-formed original work.²⁴ Creators can then distribute their completed works globally via free online platforms.²⁵ From there, content discovery tools and social media allow new works to be discovered and widely shared.²⁶ In this way, creators can bypass industry gatekeepers and present their unvarnished voices to a global audience. Commentators view this as a more authentic, egalitarian process of cultural exchange.²⁷ By harnessing many more creative minds, democratization is said to encourage innovation.²⁸ Instead of commercial hacks reworking “simple, trite themes” ad nauseum,²⁹ we can revel in a “golden age of creativity” or “digital renaissance.”³⁰

Commentators argue that the democratization of creativity undermines the rationale for copyright policy.³¹ As the costs of creativity have plummeted in the new, frictionless world of digitally empowered expression, DIY creators are pumping out unprecedented amounts of creative content. The resultant digital content cornucopia seemingly overturns previous paradigms based on economic scarcity,³² a process that generative AI is only accelerating.³³ Moreover, much of this creativity is generated through noncommercial motives.³⁴ Amateur creators create freely out of love and share their work for human fellowship.³⁵ Economic considerations appear irrelevant, and copyright incentives no longer needed.³⁶

That said, it is doubtful that noncommercial creativity alone would suffice to meet society’s needs. Consumers express a clear preference for professionally produced works³⁷—for good reason: even the most talented amateurs face capacity constraints that restrict their creative ambitions.³⁸ Professionals can afford to invest more attention to honing individual works and also improve their work quality over time.³⁹ The question, then, is how society should support professional creativity.

Even copy-skeptics acknowledge there may be an enduring need for copyright to fund the production of certain high-cost content such as blockbuster movies.⁴⁰ However, they argue that such examples will increasingly be the exception. Most works will be cheap and easy to create, and, if needed, ex ante costs can be recouped through alternative revenue sources even in the absence of copyright.⁴¹

C. Are Sound Recording Copyrights Still Needed?

The copy-skeptic challenge fueled by digital democratization has assumed special force in the context of commercial music recording. Compared to other forms of creative endeavors such as novel-writing or filmmaking, the intrinsic costs of creating new music are seen as low: a hit song can be written and recorded in a single day whereas novels and feature films still take months or years to complete.⁴² Copy-skeptics argue that the main costs of making music used to involve recording and distributing physical copies.⁴³ Now that digitization has allegedly caused these costs to vanish, has the rationale for copyrighting music similarly disappeared?⁴⁴

In a previous era, producing high quality recorded music required professional studios with million-dollar equipment and highly paid technicians to operate them.⁴⁵ Completed records then needed to be printed in factories on physical media (vinyl, tapes, CDs) and trucked to warehouses and retail centers.⁴⁶ Such production and distribution processes were beyond the reach of individual artists. Accordingly, musicians depended on record labels to furnish the capital and provide the means to record their work and distribute it to consumers.⁴⁷ Copyright provided the economic means to pay for it all.⁴⁸

Today, this dependency on intermediaries no longer exists. A musician can strum on her guitar until inspiration strikes and then record a song on her laptop that she releases the same day all by her herself.⁴⁹ Using inexpensive tools, today’s artists are now equipped with the creative capacity equivalent to a million-dollar studio and can supposedly produce just as high-quality recordings. Or so the claim goes—and claims to this effect are widespread in scholarly literature.⁵⁰

The effects of digital technologies on distribution are seen as no less transformative. With a few simple mouse-clicks, artists can upload their music onto free content hosting platforms that instantly put their work within the reach of millions, if not billions, of potential listeners.⁵¹ Social media and online algorithms replace the promotional functions formerly performed by record labels.⁵² As a result, talented artists can go viral virtually overnight. The breakout success of DIY artists such as Justin Bieber—Oliver Anthony’s forerunner—is widely cited as blazing a path for wannabe artists to master their own destinies.⁵³

To copy-skeptics, now that artists can create, record, and distribute their music inexpensively without the assistance of intermediaries, the need for sound recording copyrights is questionable.⁵⁴ Copyright may have been justified in the analog era as the means to recoup the costs of industry intermediaries, but now that digital democratization has disintermediated the recording process, this rationale no longer applies.⁵⁵

Indeed, the evisceration of costs that digital technology supposedly delivers undermines the entire utilitarian calculus for copyright. Copyright skeptics describe costs as essentially disappearing, plunging to a fraction of previous levels, with a “trend line . . . of steep decline” that is all-but guaranteed to continue.⁵⁶ As costs disappear, the rationale for economic incentives via copyright similarly recedes—or so skeptics would have you believe.⁵⁷

Driven by intrinsic motivations, artists will be free to create and indulge their inner passion. Technology has liberated them from a dependency on industry intermediaries and made high quality creative productions accessible even to hobbyists. Musicians can focus on making great music and sharing it with the world. Any remaining recording costs can be offset through alternative revenues. Artists can earn their living by holding concerts, selling t-shirts, or crowdfunding.⁵⁸ Accordingly, skeptics argue that music copyrights are either no longer needed or could be drastically pruned in scope.⁵⁹

Eliminating the sound recording copyright would cause music industry revenues to plummet.⁶⁰ Yet, copy-skeptics are unfazed. They argue modern music production is no longer dependent on current industry structures.⁶¹ Studios would close, and producers and engineers would have to find new jobs. However, skeptics assure us that we need not weep for such twenty-first century buggy-whip manufacturers. Creativity will survive.⁶² And while the recording industry establishment goes the way of the dinosaurs, musicians themselves will flourish in this brave new era of digital democratization. After all, artists only received a small fraction of recording revenues.⁶³ Digital disintermediation eliminates the wasteful diversion of funds to support a parasitic industry. Liberated from labels and the tyranny of the corporate bottom line, digitally empowered artists will embrace their new-found creative freedom, and new music will keep flowing without any loss of quality.⁶⁴

Even without repealing the sound recording copyright, copy-skeptics could influence current policy debates in other ways. It is worth noting that the U.S. Copyright Act already discriminates against sound recording copyrights, giving them weaker protection compared to other forms of creativity.⁶⁵ Proposed legislation in Congress would eliminate such disparities, and, for example, expand the public performance right for sound recordings to put it on a parity with other copyrighted expression (as is almost universally the case in other countries).⁶⁶ Arguments questioning the rationale for sound recording copyrights bear directly on the justifiability of such legislation. After all, if music can be produced cheaply at home, maybe we don’t need exclusive rights to pay for it.

Furthermore, the Music Modernization Act of 2018 created for the first time a statutory compensation right allowing music producers and engineers to share in royalties from music streaming.⁶⁷ For some, this royalty-sharing provision provided long-overdue compensation to vital creative contributors.⁶⁸ From a copy-skeptic standpoint, however, viewed through the lens of digital democratization, such earmarks appear more akin to a rent-seeking boondoggle. Now that software has rendered producers and engineers obsolete, why should society pay for them via copyright law? Needless to say, if the skeptics’ views prevail, such compensation rights would be repealed and sound recording copyrights severely pared back or eliminated.

Such a drastic policy reversal demands persuasive justification. Thus far, however, copyright skeptics’ claims about digital democratization’s commercial significance remain largely unproven. To be sure, digital technologies do bring powerful capabilities. Droves of amateur and indie musicians are indeed recording and posting their music online. Indeed, the total volume of music output is mind-blowing: 120,000 newly released tracks are uploaded onto music streaming platforms every day.⁶⁹ For aspiring artists, the ability to indulge your creative impulses and share your work with friends is doubtlessly gratifying. Consumers, too, benefit from the expanded array of music offerings; new voices and sounds are bubbling up through diverse pathways that the analog era may have excluded.⁷⁰ Indie artists are capturing a growing share of music streaming revenues.⁷¹ Digital democratization is clearly working as advertised to this extent.⁷²

Yet, the question still remains: Has digital disintermediation lived up to its hype on the commercial front? Sure, entry barriers to DIY artists have diminished. But just because you can enter doesn’t mean you’ll succeed. And just because indie artists are getting streamed doesn’t mean we should assume their tracks are self-produced. Focusing specifically on DIY musicians, how democratized is the current market? Are DIY records moving the needle in a commercially significant manner? In particular, are people actually listening to DIY music in meaningful numbers?

On this score, the digital democratization narrative rests largely on assertions about capabilities—what DIY artists “can do” in theory, rather than evidence of real-world achievement. Reliable data on commercial outcomes remain notably absent. However, we do know that the majority of DIY music fails to generate significant uptake: around 80% of artists on Spotify garner fewer than 50 monthly listeners.⁷³ Democratization proponents tout reports of DIY artists “going viral.” However, we should hesitate to extrapolate a handful of cherry-picked examples into claims of a viable business model. Moreover, the continued existence of recording studios, producers, and engineers two decades into the digital revolution suggests that both the music industry and musicians themselves see enduring value in professional production processes despite the supposed democratization of music. Do they know something that the copy-skeptics don’t?

To shed light on these questions, we examine the key premises underlying the digital democratization narrative empirically, drawing on both qualitative and quantitative findings: do digital tools empower DIY creators to bypass professional assistance and achieve commercially competitive results? If so, the charts should be populated with tracks made via bedroom recordings. We explore this question in Part II. In Part III, we examine whether technology has made recording professionals obsolete.

II. Testing Democratization Claims Empirically

A. Charts Do Not Lie

1. Methodology

To test the theory that digital democratization has precipitated a plethora of successful DIY artists who forgo the use of recording and production professionals, we surveyed multiple U.S. song charts at different points in time from 2020 to 2023. Charts are a well-recognized, standard measure of a song’s commercial success. And commercial success signifies popular significance. Music that consumers value and want to listen to has both social and economic utility.⁷⁴ As such, charts supply one measure of quality. If DIY recordings really are equivalent to professionally made music in consumers’ eyes, we would expect to see such home-brewed tracks showing up regularly on the charts.

To investigate, we sampled data from three major U.S. weekly charts—The Billboard Hot 100, the Rolling Stone Top 100, and the Spotify Top 200.⁷⁵ The Billboard and Rolling Stone chart methodologies incorporate data on physical and digital sales and streaming activity via online music services.⁷⁶ Spotify is the world’s largest streaming service, and its Top 200 chart is derived exclusively from its user streaming data.⁷⁷

To address concerns that our data might be missing a bevy of DIY tracks lurking just below the top 100, we collected data for “lower echelon” tracks outside the typical top 100 chart metric most used to identify a week’s most popular tracks. First, as noted, our Spotify chart samples extend down to the 200th most popular track, which is as far down as Spotify’s publicly available data goes. Second, we sampled two weeks of Rolling Stone’s “Trending 25” chart, which ranks newly released songs that achieve the greatest gains in popularity in a given week measured by percentage growth in audio streams.⁷⁸ This data provides a snapshot of songs garnering substantial streaming activity but nevertheless sitting outside of the top 100 tracks at the time of the sample.

In all, we sampled the following U.S. charts:

In total, we surveyed 1,350 chart positions. Because there is considerable overlap between different charts and longitudinally on the same charts (some tracks have sufficient staying power to linger on the chart for months or years), our total dataset of unique tracks is 805.⁷⁹ If we exclude the 39 tracks in our sample that only appear on the Trending 25 charts, and instead focus solely on the tracks in our sample that reached the top 200, that subset is 766 unique tracks.

For each track in our dataset, we collected information about the number and role(s) of recording professionals—aside from the artist(s)—involved in the track’s recording and production.⁸⁰ If a track’s featured artist(s) or group members (if the artist was a group) was/were the only individual(s) credited, and if our supplemental research indicated the artist(s) had no prior professional recording experience, we labeled the track “Likely DIY.” Conversely, if there was at least one recording professional aside from the artists—a producer, recording engineer, mix engineer, editor, or mastering engineer—involved in the track’s production, then we coded the track as professionally assisted and “Not DIY.”⁸¹

Likewise, we coded tracks as “Not DIY” where an artist was the sole credited recording professional(s) on the track, but they had previous experience working as a recording professional for others. We refer to such cases as “ringers.” Our reason for excluding ringers is that the point of our study was to investigate the claim that digital technology empowers anyone to record high-quality music. To be sure, recordings by ringers do qualify as DIY in a broader sense. But an artist with prior experience recording music professionally is definitionally a recording professional and does not fit the prototype of a digitally empowered dilettante at the heart of the democratization narrative.⁸² One of the ringer tracks in our database is illustrative: “Gravity (Feat. Tyler the Creator)” by Brent Fayaz and DJ Dahi, which credits DJ Dahi as the only recording professional.⁸³ At the time “Gravity” was released, DJ Dahi had been a producer for such superstars as Drake, Kendrick Lamar, and Rhianna. A technically “DIY” track by a superstar producer says little about the democratization of recording.

There were only a handful of “ringer” tracks (eight) in our dataset, and—as we discuss below—including these “ringer” tracks would not significantly alter our findings. Moreover, to the extent that our methodology “undercounts” DIY tracks by excluding tracks self-produced by ringers, that number is nearly offset by a corresponding “overcount” of five tracks in the opposite direction resulting from our treatment of “Close Calls” (discussed in the following paragraph). In any case, we will revisit “ringers” and other excluded “Edge Case Rejects” again below when we discuss our findings.⁸⁴

As noted, our departure from a literal definition of DIY recordings cuts two ways. While we coded “ringers” as non-DIY, such exclusions were offset by our inclusion of “Close Calls” in our analysis. The latter category comprised tracks where someone other than the artist was credited for the recording, therefore falling outside a literal DIY definition. In a handful of such cases (five), however, we determined that the credited individual had no prior record of professional experience (or their experience was indeterminate). We coded these tracks as “Close Calls” and describe them more fully below.⁸⁵ We will refer to both “Likely DIY” and “Close Calls” collectively as “Plausibly DIY” tracks.

A further complication was posed by indie artists who purchased “beats” from producers through online beat marketplaces such as BeatStars or Tracktrain and then layered their own self-recorded vocals over the beat. This represents an increasingly common approach to music production. Moreover, the term “beats” is something of a misnomer. Beat makers usually offer fully produced and mixed songs sans vocals, consisting of full instrumentation and drums.⁸⁶ All the artist need do after purchasing a beat is write and record vocals over the pre-produced music bed. Because the beats form the sonic, rhythmic, and musical essence of the track, the beat maker is typically credited as a producer of the artist’s finished track.⁸⁷ Four tracks that credited the beat maker as the sole producer and recording professional appeared in our sample that were otherwise apparently DIY and therefore posed a classificatory conundrum.⁸⁸

On one view, the clearly commercial nature of beat marketplaces should disqualify any resulting tracks from classification as “DIY” productions. After all, by starting with a prefabricated track as their starting point, the artist is outsourcing the bulk of the production work to a professional vendor who effectively acts as both a producer/engineer and contributing musician. The artist’s subsequent addition of vocals is a relatively trivial step in terms of recording complexity.⁸⁹ It’s also worth noting that the very existence of beat marketplaces is underwritten by copyright law, which protects beat makers against unauthorized appropriation of their work.⁹⁰ The flourishing of such markets therefore seems inconsistent with the future of autonomous, self-reliant production that copyright skeptics envision.

However, on a broader view, one can argue that such decentralized markets are perfectly consistent with democratization. Many beat makers operate outside the traditional industry structures dominated by record labels, recording studios, and recording professionals. So long as the beat maker is not a “ringer” with years of professional industry experience, then arguably their contributions to the finished track could still be considered as operating within a DIY paradigm in which one bedroom producer collaborates sequentially with another.

We ultimately decided to err on the side of inclusivity and include tracks based on purchased beats where we could confirm the beat maker themselves lacked an established professional record. This meant that we had to evaluate the prior experience level of the beat maker to determine whether the track meets our criteria for DIY purity. In two cases, the beat producer had a professional track record as a producer; in those cases, we coded the track as “Not DIY” because the track benefitted substantially from the skills of an experienced professional (akin to ringers).⁹¹ In the two remaining cases, sources indicated that the beat maker/producer was effectively an amateur (in the first case) or lacked an established professional record (in the second).⁹² We coded these as “Likely DIY” and a “Close Call,” respectively.⁹³

We also recorded information about whether the song was self-released by the artist or released by a record label. If a record label released the song, we coded for the type of label involved (major, major imprint, or large, medium, or small independent).⁹⁴ However, the involvement of a record label, by itself, did not affect our coding for DIY purity. Similarly, we recorded credits given to outside songwriters (i.e. writers other than the performing artists), but this data did not affect DIY determinations.

As there is no single authoritative music credits database, we primarily used the Apple Music and Spotify credits databases to collect information about recording professionals, songwriters, and labels. We then cross-checked that data against the Jaxsta, Tidal, MusicBrainz, and Discogs music credit databases. In cases where there were discrepancies or incomplete data, we performed broader web searches to gather supplemental or clarifying information about the recording from sources such as music publications, Genuis.com, and Wikipedia.

2. Findings

In general, nearly all the songs in our dataset reflected heavy reliance on recording professionals. On average, 5.5 professionals (excluding the artist) represented 3.4 roles in the recording process—i.e., producer, recording engineer, editor, mix engineer, or mastering engineer.⁹⁵ As these numbers indicate, on average, the songs in our dataset had multiple professionals in some roles. For example, The Weeknd’s smash hit “Blinding Lights,” which appeared in our dataset in 2020, had ten recording professionals involved (excluding the artist): two producers, four recording engineers, two mixing engineers, and two mastering engineers. We thus counted ten professionals on this track for four roles (producer, recording engineer, mixing engineer, and mastering engineer). Producer was the most common category of professional credited on tracks in our dataset, but most of the tracks in our dataset also employed mixing engineers and mastering engineers.⁹⁶

2.1 DIY Tracks in the Top 100

Judging based on our survey of the music making the charts, reports of recording professionals’ demise are greatly exaggerated. Digital democratization claims that DIY recordings can compete effectively simply don’t hold up—at least not at the highest levels of music consumption.

Start by considering the most commercially successful tier of music—tracks appearing in the top 20 on any major US chart: we found zero that we could categorize as unambiguously DIY. Even if we include “Close Calls,” we found only one such recording that reached the top 20: the aforementioned “Rich Men North of Richmond,” which, as we discuss below, is an outlier in several ways and poorly fits the standard digital democratization narrative. In other words, out of the 180 chart positions (comprising 122 unique tracks) in our sample that were in the top 20 on a major US chart, none were clearly DIY, and just one was Plausibly DIY—amounting to well under 1%. In short, DIY recordings are virtually absent from the hit parade.

DIY recordings fare no better if we expand the dataset to include tracks in the top 100. We found just two Likely DIY tracks and two Plausibly DIY tracks (including “Rich Men”) among the 900 chart positions, comprising 549 unique tracks, that we sampled in the top 100 of the Spotify, Rolling Stone, and Billboard top 100 charts.⁹⁷ In other words, at best, DIY tracks account for 0.7% of the unique tracks in our top 100 dataset.

It is worth pausing to contextualize these findings. Commentators have argued for two decades that cheap, accessible digital recording technologies will enable bedroom artists to forgo big production budgets, professional studios, and recording engineers, and still achieve commercial success using little more than their laptops. However, after sampling 549 unique tracks in the top 100, we found zero unambiguously DIY “mega-successes” (those that made it into the top 20) and at most four Plausibly DIY tracks.

Moreover, as we detail in the following discussion, few of the DIY tracks that we found cleanly fit the paradigm of the DIY artist composing, recording, and launching original hits from their laptop. Two were covers of successful songs, and thus likely buoyed by the popularity of the professionally produced originals. Others that we classified as “Close Calls” involved outside producers, though it was unclear how experienced the producers were.

2.1.1 Top 100 Tracks in Our Dataset Coded as “Likely DIY”

As noted, we found only two “Likely DIY” tracks in the top 100. We classified the following tracks as Likely DIY because, based on available evidence, the artists were not seasoned recording professionals and they handled all recording and production tasks entirely on their own, without outside help.

1. “Put Your Records On” by Ritt Momney (#84 on Rolling Stone Top 100 and #28 on Spotify Top 200 charts for week of October 2, 2020). The artist (under his real name, Jack Rutter) is credited as producer, and subsequent research suggested he handled recording tasks himself and self-released the recording without a label. The track’s production features the artist singing over a bed of electronic music and a programmed beat. Based on the track’s success, he later signed a major label record deal with Columbia. The recording’s popularity was fueled by its inclusion as backing music on a viral TikTok “make-up challenge.”⁹⁸ “Put Your Records On” is a cover of a 2006 hit by Corinne Bailey Rae that charted on the Billboard Hot 100 and earned a Grammy nomination.

2. “SugarCrash!” by ElyOtto (#82 on Spotify Top 200 for the week of February 19, 2021). “SugarCrash!” is an eighty-second long “hyperpop” song with synths, drum machines, distorted~bass, and high-pitched auto-tuned vocals, all reportedly recorded and mixed by the artist using GarageBand software.⁹⁹ The artist uploaded the song to Soundcloud in August 2020, and it trended virally on TikTok in 2021, where it was widely used in connection with various memes.¹⁰⁰ All the sources we consulted credited the artist as the producer, mix engineer, and recording engineer, and we found no sources indicating the artist had prior recording experience. No other professionals were credited. Accordingly, we coded this track as Likely DIY.

2.1.2 Top 100 Tracks in Our Dataset Coded as “Close Calls”

We classified the following two tracks in our dataset as “Close Calls” because sources credit an outside producer, but the extent of the producer’s professional experience is unclear.¹⁰¹

1. “Rich Men North of Richmond” by Oliver Anthony (#6 on Spotify Top 200 chart for the week of September 1, 2023). As discussed above, this track captured the artist performing live with his acoustic guitar outside his farm. The audio was captured on a single microphone. The recording was not self-produced; Anthony’s manager, Draven Riffe, produced and engineered the recording, which amounted to setting up the microphone and capturing Anthony’s performance, likely with the addition of some basic post-processing (adding equalization, reverb, and dynamic compression).¹⁰² The track was independently released by the artist. Endorsements by conservative politicians helped drive the track’s meteoric rise up the charts after Riffe posted the video on YouTube.¹⁰³

We classify this track as a Close Call because it is unclear how much professional experience Riffe had before producing it. Sources suggest Riffe had prior experience as an artist who wrote, recorded, and self-released his own music online. According to Riffe’s biography on Spotify, he “gained a small fan base after being recorded by Kanye West in a small bar in Wyoming during a performance.”¹⁰⁴ In 2018, Riffe co-founded the YouTube channel where Anthony was first featured, known as Radiowv, “which spotlights unsigned Americana and country acts in the Virginia/West Virginia region.”¹⁰⁵ It is clear, therefore, that Riffe had some music industry experience. It is less clear to us, however, the extent to which that experience elevates him to a level above a typical hobbyist producer.

Importantly, even if one does classify “Rich Men North of Richmond” as DIY, it is an extreme outlier in its level of technical simplicity. A single microphone is the easiest DIY recording imaginable for a hobbyist with modest skill to capture, mix, and master. The approach worked admirably in this case because the intent was to keep the recording as seemingly authentic as possible in keeping with its~folksy, blue-collar aesthetic.¹⁰⁶ Although such a simple recording would be within the capabilities of most recording hobbyists, few artists, songs, and genres will find success with this formula. Recordings that consist of a single microphone capturing a live performance are virtually unheard of on the charts. In any event, “Rich Men” is a poor exemplar of digital democratization, since home hobbyists could make comparable single-microphone tape recordings long before the digital revolution.

2. “Heading South” by Zach Bryan (#36 on Spotify Top 200 chart for the week of September 1, 2023). Bryan’s backstory is not dissimilar to that of Oliver Anthony. “Heading South” first gained popularity when Bryan, then in the Navy, posted a video on YouTube in 2019 of himself performing the song on an acoustic guitar behind his barracks.¹⁰⁷ He self-recorded his first album (which did not include “Heading South”) in an Airbnb with mattresses hanging from the walls.¹⁰⁸ From there he shot to superstardom, but reportedly still eschewed help from established industry professionals, aiming to preserve his grassroots aesthetic.¹⁰⁹ His second album, Elisabeth, which included the studio version of “Heading South” that appeared in our dataset, “was recorded using his laptop in a horse barn behind his house.”¹¹⁰

“Heading South” is sparsely produced, featuring only Bryan’s voice, his acoustic guitar, a rhythm track, and a pedal steel guitar. The credits for “Heading South” list Leo Alba as producer, mixing engineer, and mastering engineer; subsequent research has revealed scant information about Alba’s recording experience.¹¹¹ One source simply describes him as Bryan’s “boss.”¹¹² No other recording credits are provided, although the relative consistency of levels in the recording suggests that a professional mastering engineer may have been involved. Because of the paucity of information about Alba and other contributors, we believe “Heading South” is best categorized as a Close Call.

2.2 Sampling Lower Echelon Tracks

When we shift the focus to our “long tail” sample—Spotify chart positions #101–200 and the Rolling Stone Trending 25—the frequency of DIY recordings does increase, but not dramatically. Of the 343 unique tracks we sampled in the bottom half of the Spotify charts, we found just two Likely DIY tracks and two Close Calls.¹¹³ Therefore, at best, the percentage of Plausibly DIY tracks in this sample amounts to 1.2%.

Among the fifty Trending 25 tracks we sampled, accounting for 49 unique tracks, we found one Likely DIY track and two Close Calls.¹¹⁴ The relatively high percentage of Plausibly DIY tracks in this sample—6%—may reflect both the small sample size and the idiosyncratic nature of the selection criteria: As noted, tracks made the Trending 25 based on their relative rise in popularity, rather than aggregate consumption. In fact, none of the three DIY candidates in our Trending 25 sample ever reached a position on the conventional charts. As such, they can be regarded as outliers.

In any case, of the 388 unique tracks (450 chart positions) in our combined “long tail” sample, we found just seven Plausibly DIY tracks, or 1.8%. We discuss all seven tracks below.

1. “Star Shopping” by Lil Peep (#118 on Spotify Top 200 for the week of February 19, 2021, #136 on Spotify Top 200 chart for October 2, 2020, and #126 on Spotify Top 200 for February 24, 2023). Lil Peep first posted the track on Soundcloud in 2015, and it enjoyed widespread popularity (ultimately reaching 4x platinum status in the US), especially after its 2019 re-release following the artist’s untimely death in 2017. The track credits an outside producer, Krypik (aka Cabe Dixon Brown II), who gave the beat to Lil Peep.¹¹⁷ The beat is centered around a sampled guitar riff written and recorded by the artist Yppah.¹¹⁸ It appears that Lil Peep was a relatively unknown artist and Kryptik was a fledgling “bedroom” producer at the time he made the beat, with no verifiable track record of selling beats or other professional experience, so we coded “Star Shopping” as Likely DIY.¹¹⁹

2. “No Se Va” by Grupo Frontera (#157 on Spotify Top 200 for the week of February 24, 2023). Billboard describes Grupo Frontera as “merely a local band from the Texas border town McAllen, creating music as a hobby and performing at family gatherings” until they self-released several cover recordings in early 2022.¹²⁰ Like Ritt Momney’s track discussed above, “No Se Va” is a cover (of a 2019 hit single by Colombian group Morat) that achieved viral fame via TikTok.¹²¹ The song was reportedly recorded live in one take.¹²² No one is officially credited as producer or engineer on the track, but the song’s Wikipedia page credits Grupo Frontera as the sole producer.¹²³ We found no sources indicating professional help with the recording, so we coded this track as Likely DIY.

3. “Revival” by Zach Bryan (#139 on Spotify Top 200 for the week of September 1, 2023). Like “Heading South,” “Revival” appeared on Bryan’s 2020 album Elisabeth, discussed in detail above.¹²⁴ Leo Alba is also credited on “Revival” as producer, mixing engineer, and mastering engineer.¹²⁵ For the same reasons noted in our discussion of “Heading South,” we coded “Revival” as a Close Call.

4. “Lets Link” by WhoHeem (#128 on Spotify Top 200 the week of October 20, 2020). This track credits Micha Armstard (under the moniker LoyalThePlug) as producer.¹²⁶ Armstard is a beat maker who as early as 2019 (a year before “Lets Link” was released) was credited on tracks by other artists.¹²⁷ Nevertheless, because we could not confirm that Armstard had a professional track record beyond a few prior beat sales, we conservatively coded this track as a Close Call.

5. “Condemned” by Zach Bryan (#16 on Rolling Stone Trending 25 for the week of February 19, 2021). Like the other Zach Bryan songs discussed above, this song credits Leo Alba as producer, mixing engineer, and mastering engineer.¹²⁸ For reasons noted above, we coded “Condemned” as a Close Call.

6. “Tokyo” by Leat’eq (#15 on Rolling Stone Trending 25 chart for the week of February 19, 2021). “Tokyo” is an electronic dance music (EDM) track released in 2018 by Los Angeles-based producer Leat’eq who, according to their Soundcloud page, has been recording and self-releasing music online since as early as 2015.¹²⁹ “Tokyo” is a slow dance track consisting entirely of synthesizers and drum machines, with a sampled female voice singing simple, repetitive Japanese lyrics. Leat’eq is credited in all production and recording roles.¹³⁰ “Tokyo” did not reach any of the U.S. top 100 charts. We coded this track as Likely DIY.

7. “Tooka” by GirlzLuhDev (#16 on Rolling Stone Trending 25 for October 2, 2020). This self-released track credits one recording professional, an outside producer using the moniker Prod. Safety.¹³¹ Our research uncovered no other releases that credit Prod. Safety, and we could find no further information regarding their identity or professional experience. Accordingly, we coded “Tooka” as a Close Call.

2.3 Taking Stock of Our Full Dataset

In total, of 805 unique tracks (1,350 chart positions) sampled, we found just five Likely DIY tracks—a mere 0.6%. Applying our more lenient criteria to include Plausibly DIY tracks, the count grows to eleven tracks out 805—or 1.4%. However, when we remove the Trending 25 data (whose popularity remains indeterminate) and focus solely on tracks charting in the top 200, the percentage of Plausibly DIY tracks falls to 1%. In other words, a mere 1% of tracks that achieved this key marker of commercial success—reaching the top 200 charts—are DIY.

Moreover, the frequency with which DIY tracks appear remains remarkably consistent no matter how we slice the data: whether we look at tracks in the top 20, top 100, or top 200, we find that Plausibly DIY tracks account for a tiny fraction of the total—1% or less.¹³²

Moreover, even if we expand our definition of DIY tracks to include all the twelve Edge Case Rejects we excluded, our findings barely change. Adding back in the eight tracks that were excluded because the artist was a “ringer” with professional recording experience,¹³³ the two additional tracks where a totality of circumstances created doubts about the tracks’ DIY bona fides,¹³⁴ and the two beat-based tracks that we excluded based on the beat maker’s professional track record¹³⁵ brings the total DIY candidates to just 20 out of 766 in our top 200 sample—or 2.6%. In other words, applying even our least restrictive standard of DIY purity does not meaningfully alter our core finding: DIY success stories remain the rare exception, not the rule.

3. Discussion

The broad takeaway from our data is that it is exceedingly difficult for purely DIY recordings to crack the weekly top 100—an important indicator of commercial viability. Despite the millions of DIY tracks released every year, even reaching the top 200 appears largely beyond reach. As noted, only 1% of the tracks in our sample achieved this milestone.

It is worth examining more closely the Plausibly DIY tracks that we found defying these odds. Some noteworthy commonalities between many of these Plausibly DIY tracks call into question key aspects of the democratization claim.

First, the democratization proponents often tout an emerging paradigm of post-professional creativity dominated by amateurs.¹³⁶ It’s worth noting that none of the Plausibly DIY recordings we identified were released by a “bedroom” hobbyist without aspirations to commercial success. While commentators celebrate a post-scarcity economy in which amateur creators “give away information for free in return for status, benefits to reputation, [or] the value of the innovation to themselves,”¹³⁷ evidence for this brave new world remains notably absent in our sample. All the creators of the Plausibly DIY tracks in our dataset recorded their music and posted it online in the apparent hopes of building an audience and leveraging that acclaim to develop a sustainable career as a professional musician. Upon achieving online success, all the DIY creators in our sample whose songs charted in the top 200 pursued full-time music careers; four have signed major record deals and two have remained independent but hired Grammy-winning producers for subsequent releases.¹³⁸

Second, most of the Plausibly DIY songs in our dataset are relatively simple productions that newbies with basic knowledge of recording and mixing are more likely to be able to pull off. The tracks involve either vocals and a fairly simple electronic music bed (in the case of “Put Your Records On” and “Tokyo”), heavily incorporate digital samples of other recordings (such as “Star Shopping”), or involve vocals with sparse acoustic instrumentation (in the case of “Rich Men North of Richmond” and “Heading South”). As our interviewees elaborate in Part III, below, such limited musical arrangements typically require less skill and experience to record and mix and thus are more amenable to DIY production. By contrast, recordings that feature denser, slicker productions or involve recording live drums, guitars, and other instruments usually outstrip the hobbyist’s ability.¹³⁹

The two exceptions in our dataset are Grupo Frontera’s “No Se Va” and Zach Bryan’s “Revival,” which involve recordings of backing vocals and live instruments including drums, guitars, bass, and other instruments. The amateurish quality of the “No Se Va” recording is manifest in the clicky, tinny drum sound, over-indulgent reverbs, and out-of-tune harmony vocals. “Revival” is similarly rough.¹⁴⁰ Nevertheless, the recordings were hits, demonstrating that if a recording goes viral and the song and performance are catchy, a “good enough” production can be good enough. That said, our data does not support the idea that DIY recording is a viable strategy for such bands’ success: these are the only tracks in our sample that included a live band but did not apparently utilize recording professionals.

A third important commonality is that two of the DIY tracks in our dataset—“Put Your Records On” and “No Se Va”—are covers. While this does not negate the DIY nature of the recordings, covering an existing hit arguably confers a creative head start because the covering artist can use the prior example as a guidepost for interpretive possibilities. And covering a previously successful hit clearly furnishes a commercial advantage vis-à-vis a DIY artist recording entirely original material. The underlying composition already has proven popular appeal, and the cover version can tap into an existing audience base who may be curious to listen to the new version.¹⁴¹ While such reinterpretations have their creative merits, they hardly embody the quantum leap in innovation that democratization pundits have promised.¹⁴²

Fourth, our data indicates that the widespread phenomenon of music “going viral” does not necessarily imply increased opportunities for DIY recordings. First, many of the best-known viral success stories turn out to involve professionally backed productions.¹⁴³ Second, while TikTok’s rise as a viral launching pad for new music has opened doors for many DIY artists,¹⁴⁴ the revenue opportunities on TikTok remain limited.¹⁴⁵ TikTok reportedly does not share advertising revenue with artists for music used on its site, and it acquires blanket licenses from major content owners for a flat up-front fee.¹⁴⁶ Therefore, for most artists, the financial payoff from TikTok virality needs to come from attracting plays on other platforms.

To be sure, there is evidence that TikTok’s ascendance is accelerating disintermediation and democratizing the music industry.¹⁴⁷ TikTok gives artists an unprecedented opportunity to promote their works virally and leverage that success into streams and sales.¹⁴⁸ Even major record companies admit that they have lost power and that TikTok has significantly leveled the playing field for independent artists.¹⁴⁹ Our dataset does include three Likely DIY recordings whose chart success is attributed directly to TikTok (Ritt Momney’s “Put Your Records On,” ElyOtto’s “SugarCrash!”, and Grupo Frontera’s “No Se Va”).¹⁵⁰ Moreover, as we discuss below, the number of professionally produced self-releases and independent label releases that chart is increasing.¹⁵¹

But despite these increased opportunities, examples of truly homebrewed recordings making it onto the hit parade remain extremely rare. If, for example, we focus on our most recent batch of data, the two weeks of the Spotify Top 200 we sampled in 2023, we find just two Plausibly DIY tracks in the top 50—“Rich Men” and “Heading South,” both of which have questionable DIY bona fides. When you add in our sampling of tracks ranked 51–200 on the 2023 Spotify charts, the number of Plausibly DIY tracks rises to four out of 324 unique tracks—a mere 1.2%—and one of those tracks (“Revival”) is by the same artist who recorded “Heading South.” Thus, just three artists were able to land a plausibly DIY recording on the Spotify top 200 during the two weeks we sampled in 2023. And most of those four tracks come with major caveats as noted above: they enjoyed a leg up as covers of popular songs, or they involve styles or limited arrangements that are relatively simple to record and mix, or they benefitted from an extrinsic boost for political reasons (“Rich Men”).

B. Are Charts a Reasonable Measure of DIY Success?

The charts provide the only publicly available data on music consumption trends. They are widely accepted as popularity indices for music tracks and have acquired salience as markers of cultural relevance and commercial success.¹⁵² Charts are by no means perfect. They are frequently alleged to be manipulated by industry power players. Furthermore, chart data extends no farther than the top 200 tracks per week and therefore fail to capture most plays in the “long tail” of music consumption.¹⁵³ It is important, therefore, to consider whether charts are a reasonable measure of DIY recording success.

Regarding the first issue—whether the charts are inaccurate because they may be manipulated through payola or other means, there is no reason to believe that the charts we consulted are so heavily manipulated that it would materially affect our results. Music charts such as Billboard and Rolling Stone do routinely face accusations that their methodologies are subject to manipulation by rights owners.¹⁵⁴ Because those charts’ methodologies include sales and radio play, allegations of manipulation often revolve around artists or labels artificially goosing sales numbers.¹⁵⁵ It is unclear how pervasive such manipulation might be.

However, the Spotify charts we consulted are not susceptible to such tactics. Because they are based on actual streaming data, they provide a useful comparison to determine how far the “traditional” charts diverge from actual consumption patterns. To be sure, streaming manipulation schemes are widespread, too, using bots and “stream farms” to inflate numbers through “fake” streams or paying for placement on influential playlists (i.e., digital payola).¹⁵⁶ Nevertheless, fraudulent streams are unlikely to meaningfully distort Spotify’s charts because such streams account for a small percentage of overall streams, usually involve back-catalog tracks rather than new releases, and are not generally attributed to charting artists but rather to royalty-skimming fraudsters and unknown artists hoping to manufacture buzz.¹⁵⁷ Moreover, at least one study suggests that digital payola benefits indie artists more than superstars.¹⁵⁸ Admittedly, Spotify does face further suspicions of bias due to the ownership stakes that major labels hold in the service.¹⁵⁹ Such biases plausibly affect the menu of choices that Spotify’s algorithmic recommendations and pre-set playlists provide, which could tilt consumption toward label-backed superstars. Even so, the fact remains that Spotify’s chart data provide an accurate reflection of what its subscribers are actually listening to.

We therefore argue that, despite their flaws, charts provide a reasonably reliable snapshot of popularity and consumption. Although each chart employs a distinct methodology, with its own strengths and weaknesses, our results remain remarkably consistent across all data sources: DIY artists are virtually non-existent on all of them. Moreover, the charts broadly agree regarding the tracks that are represented within a given week: We compared two weeks of Rolling Stone Top 100 and Spotify Top 100 chart data and found that they are more than two-thirds identical.¹⁶⁰

The second concern is that the charts fail to capture DIY successes in the “long tail” outside the top 200. Our dataset is admittedly constrained by the fact that publicly available data is limited to the top 200 tracks. This data suffices to debunk democratization claims in their strongest form: that anyone equipped with a laptop can become the next Justin Bieber or Oliver Anthony and rocket directly to the top of the charts. But are we missing an important part of the democratization story in the lower echelons of music commerce?

The short answer is that we cannot be sure. However, the data we have does not support the inference that a robust class of successful DIY recordists lurks just outside the top 200. If the numbers of successful DIY recordings steadily increase the farther down the charts one looks, we would expect to have found substantially more DIY tracks in the bottom tier of the charts (chart positions 101–200) than we did in the top 100.

However, somewhat surprisingly, the number of Plausibly DIY recordings in the bottom tier of our dataset (four) equals the number of Plausibly DIY recordings in the top tier. The former dataset comprised a smaller sample of unique tracks; thus, the DIY percentage did increase modestly in the bottom tier (1.2%) compared to the top tier (0.7%). If, however, we just look at our most recent data—the two-week sample of the Spotify Top 200 from 2023—it shows the same number of Plausibly DIY recordings (two) charted in the bottom 100 as in the top 100, in both cases accounting for 1.1% of unique tracks. While it is a relatively small sample size, it does cast doubt on the assumption that over time the number of DIY artists in the bottom tier is increasing.

We did find a higher percentage of DIY tracks in our Trending 25 data. Of 49 unique tracks sampled, we found three Plausibly DIY tracks, representing 6% of the total. As noted, we have no idea how popular these songs actually were (none of the three ever charted), and the small sample size makes it difficult to extrapolate with confidence. Regardless, in all our samples, DIY tracks remain the exception, not the rule. The modest increase in DIY percentage found in the lower echelon data provides little support for the idea that a vast galaxy of successful DIY recordists populate the top 500 or even top 1000 tracks.

Our qualitative interviews with recording professionals, detailed in Part III-B below, support this conclusion. Our interviewees all have abundant experience working with precisely the type of artist in question: serious home recordists whose tracks are not in the top 200. All our interviewees agreed that in their experience only a tiny percentage of DIY artists – around 5% –can produce, engineer, mix, and master a commercially competitive recording without help.¹⁶¹ Based on our empirical data and the qualitative experience of these professionals, most of whom work with such artists daily, there are no grounds to presume successful DIY recordists are the norm rather than fringe outliers outside the top 200.

To be sure, there are tens of millions of DIY recordings available on streaming services: 96% of releases in 2023 were independent or self-releases, and doubtless many of those were DIY recordings.¹⁶² We assume that, were we to dig deep enough, at some level we would find a prevalence of DIY recordings. Yet, the exercise would prove little. Most tracks on streaming services receive minimal to no plays. Of the 184 million tracks available to stream in 2023, 158 million – 85% – received between zero and 999 plays.¹⁶³ Of those, 46 million (25%) logged zero plays.¹⁶⁴ Oceans of DIY recordings that no one listens to have zero cultural impact and provide zero revenue to artists; many represent little more than amateur vanity projects.

Charting songs represent only a minority of the overall market, but they exert a disproportionate influence both commercially and culturally.¹⁶⁵ The precise market share that hit songs collectively enjoy is not publicly known, but our off-the-record communications with knowledgeable record industry insiders indicate that the top 200 charting tracks account for between 5 to 20% of the market in a given week, depending on factors including whether one counts physical and digital sales (in which case the top 200 accounts for about 20%) or streams only (in which case it is closer to 5%). Our own rough estimate, based on publicly available Spotify streaming data, puts the streaming market share for the top 200 tracks at about 8.5% of all plays on Spotify.¹⁶⁶ While an 8-20% market share may seem underwhelming, these 200 songs are competing with over 180 million total tracks available through streaming services, including nearly a century’s worth of past hit recordings. The charts thus represent the tracks that are currently most successful at cutting through the noise and attracting listeners. They also, unsurprisingly, command an outsized share of total revenues.

Moreover, the charts are far more reflective of overall consumption than their market share in a given week suggests. The charts are heavily populated by superstars, and superstars account for the vast majority of total streams. Indeed, the top 1% of artists account for more than 90% of all streams, and the top 10% of artists account for a whopping 99.4% of all streams.¹⁶⁷ In other words, although the tracks by Taylor Swift, Drake, Bad Bunny, and the other artists that chart in a given week may account for 10% or less of streams that week, the vast majority of the remaining streams that week are of other songs by those same – and similarly situated – superstars. Indeed, as we discuss below, 75% of streams today are of catalog music – music released more than eighteen months prior. So, most streams are of former hits by top artists. But the only way for most artists to reap those tail-end rewards is to chart. Accordingly, the charts give us a clear indication of the kinds of recordings that represent the vast majority of streams.

C. The Nearly Insurmountable Odds of Succeeding with a DIY Recording

Artists have always faced daunting odds launching a viable music career and making a cultural impact. Today’s DIY artists, however, face more competition than ever before for an ever-diminishing share of listener ears. If 99.4% of all streams accrue to the top 10% of artists, then the remaining 90% of artists are scrabbling for just 0.6% of total streams.¹⁶⁸

DIY artists face numerous formidable rivals for that meager 0.6% of remaining streams. They must compete for attention against a never-ending torrent of new music—120,000 new tracks uploaded to streaming services every day.¹⁶⁹ Making the odds even longer, much of the residual 0.6% of streams may well be usurped by Spotify’s own in-house catalog of mood music playlist-filler, generated by ghost writers or AI and heavily promoted to reduce or eliminate Spotify’s royalty payments.¹⁷⁰

Most dauntingly, any artist uploading music today competes against an almost bottomless reservoir of “catalog” music—i.e., tracks released more than eighteen months prior. Catalog music has steadily eclipsed the market for new releases on streaming services.¹⁷¹ Seventy-five percent of all plays on streaming services are now catalog tracks, and more than half of all streams are of tracks older than five years.¹⁷² Such consumption includes countless beloved hits and time-honored favorites by artists who today rank outside the Spotify top 10%. These tracks, too, gobble up precious real estate in the residual 0.6% of streams.

Given these long odds, ensuring a track sounds as appealing as possible assumes make-or-break importance. A few thousand—or even a few hundred thousand—streams will not cut it for most artists seeking to build a sustainable career in music. An artist’s track needs millions of plays to generate even modest income to support the artist. At current Spotify royalty rates, an artist needs between 3 and 5 million plays to earn $15,000 – i.e., the poverty line in the United States.¹⁷³ In 2023, just one out of every two thousand tracks reached the one-million-stream threshold.¹⁷⁴ This is not to say that musicians today cannot thrive without charting; plenty of mid-level artists manage to earn a decent living.¹⁷⁵ However, the competition has grown increasingly intense at all levels.¹⁷⁶

In short, while digital democratization has lowered the barriers to entry for indie musicians, it has also increased the competition. How DIY musicians are faring in the long tail market remains uncertain. While streaming data shows that indie musicians enjoy a growing share of the market, indie does not necessarily mean DIY. Indeed, our qualitative interviews with music professionals cast doubt on the commercial viability of DIY recordings. As we discuss in Part III-B, most DIY recordings are marred by basic flaws that undermine their esthetic appeal. Tracks that are sonically substandard fail to land on key tastemaker playlists and compete poorly with professional productions.¹⁷⁷ While there are certainly exceptions, DIY recordists face an uphill battle to succeed.

D. Is Record Label Marketing Clout the Real Culprit?

Skeptics may wonder whether the lack of success DIY singles enjoy on the charts reflects less the intrinsic quality of these productions and is rather a testament to the marketing power of the major labels. Copyright skeptics often deplore the “unfair advantage” that Big Media enjoys in the marketplace, pushing their product at the expense of indie and DIY competitors,¹⁷⁸ and, as we saw, critics contend that the music charts are distorted by bias and manipulation.¹⁷⁹ If so, the contest is arguably rigged.¹⁸⁰ Overhyped superstars are triumphing over more talented and deserving indie upstarts.

On its face, even this alternative explanation runs contrary to the digital democratization narrative that anyone can record a DIY song and achieve instant viral success. Our data pours cold water on the claims that social media and online content discovery tools can effectively bypass industry gatekeepers, tastemakers, and traditional marketing campaigns. This reality check on the supposed democratizing effect of social media is supported by a broader 2018 empirical study by Glynn Lunney that similarly found a lack of correlation between the rise of social media and the number of new artists appearing on the Hot 100.¹⁸¹ Indeed, plenty of evidence suggests that digital markets are just not that democratic.¹⁸²

While marketing may account for some of the major labels’ dominant position, we should hesitate to assume that marketing alone explains the success of major label-backed superstars. The notion that consumer tastes are systematically manipulated by advertising to favor inferior products, while prevalent in the 1960s, has been largely discredited by economists since then.¹⁸³ Generally, advertising signals quality.¹⁸⁴ If the public favors label-backed superstars over indie upstarts, it is probably because the former offer music that listeners objectively value.

Record labels are in business to make money. They only back artists whose music they expect to have significant commercial appeal. They do not hesitate to ditch underperforming artists, and they regularly sign new ones (including many of the DIY artists in our sample).¹⁸⁵ They are adept at surfing the cultural zeitgeist and employ a legion of A&R reps to scour bars and honkytonks—and their digital equivalents—in search of new talents and trends. The major labels place multiple bets, knowing that only a few will pay off spectacularly.¹⁸⁶ They also invest considerable resources in grooming artists for commercial success, developing their creative projects, and helping them realize their commercial potential through a well-oiled support structure.¹⁸⁷ The entire process is engineered to deliver hit-quality material, and talented professionals contribute at every stage. Thus, we shouldn’t assume that label success relies solely on nefarious manipulation. Intrinsic quality likely plays a role as well.

To be sure, skeptics can still blame copyright for big label dominance. They argue that copyright generates monopoly rents that turbocharge both label marketing and lavish production processes.¹⁸⁸ If so, eliminating copyright could allow indie artists to compete on a more even footing and ensure that creative democratization reaches its full potential.¹⁸⁹

In fact, while eliminating copyright would certainly reduce industry revenues, the notion that doing so would cause the major labels to loosen their grip on the charts remains questionable. Cultural markets are inherently biased toward superstars.¹⁹⁰ Moreover, evidence in recent decades suggests weakening copyright could have the opposite effect. Declining revenues due to filesharing in the early 2000s led labels to cut back on indie music and double-down on promoting superstars.¹⁹¹ The winner-take-all character of digital markets further reinforces the commercial potential of top artists.¹⁹² Moreover, labels have negotiated “360-degree” deals that allow them to share in concert revenues and sponsorship deals.¹⁹³ These alternative revenue sources still hinge on chart-topping successes, giving labels every incentive to keep pushing their artists upward even in the absence of copyright. In short, eliminating copyright is unlikely to eliminate market biases.

Moreover, the ability of labels to ensure their products’ success through sheer marketing muscle should not be exaggerated. Even superstar artists backed by major labels sometimes release duds—albums that bomb in the market notwithstanding well-funded marketing campaigns.¹⁹⁴ Moreover, new distribution platforms are weakening the pillars of label hegemony.¹⁹⁵ Labels used to dominate radio top-forty hit parades, but radio’s grip on the cultural zeitgeist is declining.¹⁹⁶ Streaming platforms are less susceptible to label manipulation, and indeed, one recent study concluded that playlist payola works to the benefit of indie artists.¹⁹⁷ Further, as noted, the most dynamic music discovery platform, TikTok, operates outside labels’ control.¹⁹⁸

Moreover, while major label-backed releases dominate the charts, tracks that are self-released or backed by smaller indie labels do regularly chart. In our dataset, we coded ten self-released tracks as “Not DIY” recordings. In addition, twenty-two unique tracks on small independent labels and twenty unique tracks on medium-sized independent labels charted. All of these were professionally recorded. Such small to medium labels have much lower marketing budgets than the majors and typically sign lower-profile artists catering to niche genres.¹⁹⁹ Their ability to chart, along with the self-released tracks, belies claims of Big Label hegemony.

In total, we found fifty-two non-DIY (that is, professionally made) recordings that charted without the backing of a major label or large independent label. This fifty-two count total dwarfs the five “Likely DIY” and eleven “Plausibly DIY” tracks in our sample. Accordingly, our data suggests that an artist is between four and ten times more likely to chart with a professionally recorded track released outside the big labels than with a DIY recording. In other words, getting professional help with the recording process matters more than Big Label marketing clout.

In sum, marketing may play a role as one factor driving commercial success, but intrinsic quality matters. By quality, we mean music that appeals commercially. That’s mostly about musical talent. However, professional recordings play a role as well. The next Part delves deeper into the reasons why recording quality matters. Drawing on qualitative interviews with industry players, we seek to contextualize our chart data. We explore the technical and artistic challenges that DIY artists must overcome to achieve high quality recordings. Our interviews reveal the substantial value that recording professionals bring to the table. These findings help to explain our quantitative findings showing a scarcity of DIY tracks charting in the top 200 and offer reason to doubt the commercial viability of DIY tracks even at lower market echelons.

III. The Enduring Value of Recording Professionals

To explore the current state of play in the commercial music recording industry, we interviewed a wide array of recording industry professionals. Our interviews fill a void in the digital democratization literature, which typically glosses over multi-step processes required to achieve high-quality recordings and elides the complex skillsets required in favor of vague generalizations about the ease and accessibility of home recording software. We aimed to fill that gap by providing a detailed examination of these processes, the distinct roles played by specialized industry professionals who do this work, and the value they deliver.

Accordingly, we spoke to over twenty prominent music industry participants, including producers and engineers, musicians, and record label executives to gain insight into today’s digital recording “state of play.”²⁰⁰ Some of these conversations were informal and unstructured. However, our core findings derive from twelve in-depth, semi-structured interviews that we conducted.²⁰¹ In particular, we interviewed nine recording professionals and three record label executives. In the former category, we chose experienced producers and engineers who regularly work with independent artists and have extensive familiarity with DIY production. We also spoke with three record label executives: one from a major record label and two from independent labels (one large, one small), to gain insight into the importance of recording professionals from the perspective of those who superintend recording project budgets.

Our interviews explored the promise and peril of home-recording, the evolving but enduring need for recording professionals, and the extent to which digital tools have altered the time and costs entailed in producing commercial music. The producers and engineers we spoke with frequently work with indie artists, including home recordists (and are often hired to clean-up the latter’s mistakes). Several of them also teach workshops to musicians interested in learning DIY production techniques. Our interviewees also experienced first-hand the transition from analog to digital technology. Their “view from the trenches” provides important insights into the effects of digital technology on the music recording process.

Our interviews with the independent label executives were also revealing. Skeptics might argue that producers and engineers have a vested interest in touting their own value and dismiss major label executives as “dinosaurs” whose lavish budgets insulate them from the winds of digital change. Yet, indie record labels work with much more limited budgets and therefore have a strong interest in reducing recording costs. If DIY recordings could reliably achieve professionally competitive results, one would expect these labels to slash recording budgets and excise unnecessary payments to producers and engineers. Yet they continue to see such expenses as essential to their bottom line.²⁰² Their accounts and those of the other industry insiders we spoke to help to explain the limited inroads made by digital democratization that we identified in our quantitative data.

A. Democratization of Music Recording

As an initial matter, we asked our interviewees whether they agreed with claims made by copy skeptics that the advent of digital technologies has dramatically lowered the time, costs, and skills required to produce commercially competitive music. We then explored this topic with them at greater length to unpack the inquiry into more specific questions and arrive at a nuanced understanding of their views.

The relatively low cost and powerful capabilities of digital recording tools—personal computers, software, and digital interfaces—underpins copy-skeptic arguments about democratization.²⁰³ The recording professionals we spoke to all acknowledged the transformative potential that digital tools offered. Indeed, many of them had been early adopters of digital recording. However, when it came to assessing the extent to which such potential had actually led to a democratization of music recording, they offered a fairly consistent account: Overall, they agreed that the democratizing effects of digital technology remained limited.

Our interviewees cited several limiting factors. They emphasized that recording technology alone cannot produce great music. They further explained that: (1) modern recording tools and techniques are complex and difficult to master; (2) the music recording process is not algorithmic; and (3) experience and innate aptitude matter immensely—far more than the actual tools.

First, the process of recording, mixing, and mastering music is both technical and creative. Our interviewees all noted that these tasks cannot be reduced to a mechanical formula. Both the production and mixing processes, in particular, require engaging in a complex array of creative choices that, done well, can significantly enhance the final product.²⁰⁴ Different recording professionals starting with identical inputs will arrive at very different solutions.²⁰⁵ Their creative inputs contribute meaningfully to whether or not a song reaches its full potential.

Second, modern recording technologies are powerful, but their power lies in the sophisticated capabilities and the extensive menu of controls, settings, and options they offer.²⁰⁶ Unleashing these capabilities to their full effect is neither simple nor intuitive. To be sure, artists can go with default settings or presets. But there are no one-size-fits-all solutions.²⁰⁷ Indeed, part of the challenge is choosing the right tools or settings for the specific project at hand to create a desired effect or accentuate a mood or feeling.

This points to the third limiting factor: the role that innate ability and experience plays. Our interviewees emphasized that what matters most is not the tools, but the person wielding them.²⁰⁸ You can buy Jimi Hendrix’s guitar, but that doesn’t mean you can play like Jimi.²⁰⁹ Similarly, mastering the art of recording requires specific skills and abilities that remain just as elusive in the digital age as they did in the days of eight-track cassettes and vacuum tubes. Much of this ability comes only with experience.²¹⁰ Almost all our interviewees referred to the 10,000 hours or ten-years-to-mastery rule—the idea that mastering any new task requires repeated practice and dedication.²¹¹ They further described this learning curve as functioning along multiple dimensions.

In part, it’s about learning how to manipulate the controls and options effectively to achieve desired effects. But technical proficiency only gets one so far. Shepherding a recording to its full potential also requires creativity and musicality. It is about knowing what can be done, being alert to possibilities, and knowing when to make a particular choice and why. It means learning when to break the rules—going outside the box to conjure up something surprising and unexpected that makes for a memorable record.

Achieving quality results often requires improvising and problem-solving. Doing this well requires the ability to listen critically and understand what is working and what is not, which is a specific skill in of itself.²¹² Moreover, creative choices do not function in a vacuum. Experience teaches which elements play well with others and how to use effects to enhance an overall vibe without being jarring.

DIY artists can purchase the necessary tools and watch any number of “how to” videos online, but that does not guarantee that their home-recorded productions will succeed any more than a home chef who buys a fancy six-burner stove, a set of Le Creuset pots and pans, and a library of cookbooks can expect to turn out Michelin-star worthy cuisine.²¹³ Rather, succeeding requires talent, determination, experimentation—and typically years of experience.²¹⁴

Furthermore, DIY recordings are fraught with pitfalls for the unwary. One experienced producer/engineer who works frequently with DIY artists tells us that he uses a standard form to offer feedback at the workshops he runs. His form lists twenty common “rookie mistakes” that frequently engender subpar results and invariably appear in DIY recordings. He described the musicians attending his workshop as “heavily invested in the home recording process”—not total neophytes. Even so, every one of their demo tapes exhibits at least one of the errors on his form, and most have multiple flaws.²¹⁵ Other interviewees echoed this perspective, describing flaws in DIY recordings as pervasive.²¹⁶ One Grammy-winning professional told us that she screens newbie artists to avoid taking on error-plagued projects that turn into nightmares.²¹⁷

B. The Enduring Need for Recording Professionals

As discussed above, the overnight success of “Rich Men North of Richmond” seemed to augur a future of digital democratization. Yet, even setting aside doubts as to the track’s DIY provenance, the limited acoustic demands of “Rich Men,” recorded with a single microphone capturing a one-take acoustic guitar and vocal performance, hardly generalize to a formula for DIY emancipation.²¹⁸ After all, if there is one thing a bedroom producer with a modicum of knowledge can competently record and mix, it is a one-microphone recording.

The reality of modern music, however, is that recordings like “Rich Men North of Richmond” are extreme outliers in terms of their simplicity. The vast majority of recordings in almost every genre—pop, hip hop, rock, jazz, electronic, R&B, country, Latin, and many more—are exponentially more complex than “Rich Men North of Richmond.” Most contain dozens of tracks—individually recorded vocals, instruments, and sound effects—all fighting for the same sonic real estate in a pair of speakers or earbuds, and all in need of an experienced ear and technical wizardry to bring them sonic and artistic cohesion.

Therefore, despite the astronomical increase in DIY recordists, professionals with expertise in production, mixing, mastering, and other recording processes remain relevant and often indispensable to the creation of high-quality master recordings. There is a simple reason why record companies, independent artists, and even hobbyists still regularly use recording professionals: for most types of music, it is hard to produce commercially competitive master recordings. That is, few non-professionals can create a finished master that clearly separates vocals, instruments, and other elements in the mix in a way that grabs the listener’s attention and leaves a favorable lasting impression. Moreover, delegating discrete tasks to multiple, dedicated specialists enhances the end results. As we found in our empirical data, not only do professionally recorded tracks dominate the charts, but they typically involve an average of 5.5 recording professionals (excluding the artist) in the recording process.²¹⁹

Although professional recording software tools are now within the financial reach of any computer user,²²⁰ our interviewees were uniformly pessimistic about the ability of purely DIY recordings to succeed on a large scale. The tools—as several of our interviewees observed—do not make the artist.²²¹ Or, as one Grammy-winning mixing engineer put it, “[i]t’s never about the gear; it’s always about the ear.”²²²

Thus, a consistent, recurrent theme in our interviews was that having relevant artistic and technical experience is the most important factor in creating high-quality, professionally competitive master recordings. As acclaimed metal producer and mix engineer Jens Bogren has observed, “The most important thing when mixing [a recording]: It’s not the tools. It’s not the speakers either, or the [control] room [acoustics]. It’s the level of experience the brain has to hear things, and to hear what needs to be done.”²²³ This experience is typically gained from working on many recordings with many artists. Inexperienced recordists invariably lack the skills necessary to create professionally competitive master recordings.

All our interviewees have worked on many DIY recordings created by artists who tracked in home studios. Some of our producer and engineer interviewees work primarily with independent artists that do basic tracking themselves.²²⁴ Other interviewees reported a more diverse mix of label and independent artist clientele.²²⁵ Regardless, our interviewees estimated that at best a small percentage of inexperienced DIY recordists—around five percent—could shepherd a high-quality recording project from start to finish without professional help.²²⁶

These accounts are consistent with the quantitative chart data already discussed showing that DIY artists, in fact, are not succeeding at the highest levels commercially.²²⁷ Indeed, our qualitative findings provide a more granular and nuanced explanation for those quantitative results. Moreover, our interviewees work with artists at all levels—not merely superstars operating at the high end. Many of their clients cannot afford lavish productions and have tried to go the DIY route. These artists seek professional help because they recognize that the quality of their home recording efforts does not measure up.

That DIY artists struggle is unsurprising to those who understand the technical complexities inherent in the recording process. The natural world is three-dimensional, with sonic information arriving at our ears from 360 degrees around us. Recording engineers, however, are limited to a two-dimensional stereo format.²²⁸ Their challenge is to create within these technical limitations a listening experience that is as captivating and enveloping as a live performance—even more so.

Thus, creating a finished recording is a process of fooling and exciting the brain’s aural sensory processing, and involves far more than plugging in a few microphones and hitting record. Consider a typical recording process for a band: The vocal microphone is placed inches from the singer’s mouth.²²⁹ A complex array of six to eight microphones is placed around the drum set, each microphone usually inches from a drumhead.²³⁰ Electric guitar and bass amplifiers are played at high volume with mics placed immediately in front of the loudspeakers.²³¹ The raw recorded signals individually sound nothing like what a listener in the room would hear with their ears: no one listens with an ear inches away from the singer’s mouth, the snare drum, or amplifiers.²³² And the recorded tracks are often intentionally recorded “dry”—devoid of ambient acoustics and room reverberation—to give recording engineers maximum flexibility to add effects and creatively process the tracks later.²³³ In other words, most raw recorded tracks sound nothing like listeners’ perceptions of live music.

Recording professionals are skilled at taking these raw, isolated sounds and integrating them cohesively through a technological process called “mixing.” Moreover, in modern music the finished mix is not usually meant to be a faithful recreation of a live performance. Modern mixes create a soundscape in which the raw tracks have been processed and sculpted to boost pleasant frequencies and remove unpleasant ones, artificially add ambiance, harmonic distortion, and other effects that make the finished master sound exciting, powerful, intimate, or whatever the producer envisions. In other words, recording professionals make the finished master a stimulating artistic statement in which all the sonic elements have a presence and clarity exceeding what one would normally hear standing in the middle of a room of live performers.

Experienced recording engineers employ specialized sonic enhancement and spatial composition skills to make finished recordings particularly attractive:

Recording engineers and musicians have learned to create special effects that tickle our brains by exploiting neural circuits that evolved to discern important features of our auditory environment. These special effects are similar in principle to 3-D art, motion pictures, or visual illusions, none of which have been around long enough for our brains to have evolved special mechanisms to perceive them; rather, they leverage perceptual systems that are in place to accomplish other things. Because they use these neural circuits in novel ways, we find them especially interesting. The same is true of the way that modern recordings are made. . . . Recording engineers create . . . “hyperrealities,” the recorded equivalent of the cinematographer’s trick of mounting a camera on the bumper of a speeding car. We experience sensory impressions that we never actually have in the real world.²³⁴

The challenge for audio engineers is to create sonic hyperrealities that appeal to rather than repulse listeners. When creators’ attempts to leverage the brain’s perceptual systems miss the mark, the result is off-putting—akin to poorly rendered 3D conversions of 2D films or to the “uncanny valley” effect that marred early CGI efforts.²³⁵ The same principles apply to audio. Clumsily processed audio—poorly tuned vocals that grate on listeners’ ears, muddy or tinny sound that dulls a song’s emotional impact, or overcompressed, “squashed” mixes—mar the esthetic experience even for casual listeners using cheap earphones. It typically takes years of experience and experimentation to successfully create hyperrealistic recordings that listeners find engaging and exciting rather than insipid or grating.²³⁶

Thus, our interviewees agreed that only a small minority of DIY artists can shepherd a home recording project entirely on their own from the start to finish. Their estimates ranged from 20% to less than 1%, with most estimating that just around 5% of DIY artists can record a professionally competitive production from start to finish.²³⁷ Our interviewees also agreed that virtually no one starting off should expect to succeed without at least some external assistance.

Skeptics might wonder what “success” means in this context. We pressed our interviewees on this point, questioning whether they were fetishizing acoustic subtleties that only a professional or hard-core audiophile listening on high-end equipment would detect. They demurred, emphasizing that acoustically flawed recordings significantly detract from the listener’s experience no matters what kind of speakers you use. Moreover, several were emphatic that recording quality directly impacts the artist’s bottom line, as subpar recordings are highly unlikely to attract an audience in today’s hypercompetitive market:

There’s more music being created and released every day than there ever was in an entire year in the past. And because of that, it fuels competition. And with competition, people are going to prefer the thing that sounds a little better, even if they don’t necessarily notice or are able to articulate that, they will gravitate towards something that sounds better.²³⁸

DIY artists who try to mix their own recordings tend to have, as another interviewee observed, “a huge problem” because “you’re competing against [the] sound [of professional engineers who work on chart-topping recordings]. So, [even] if your song is great, nobody’s gonna give a shit if it doesn’t sound like [the top hits].”²³⁹ This is especially true given that taste-making gatekeepers such as popular playlist curators and social media influencers remain extremely important to the promotion and discovery of new music:

People within the industry—which is, unfortunately, still a big part of who gets heard and who gets known and discovered as an artist—tend to have the first listen to these artists. And people who listen to music all day, every day are like, “Yeah, doesn’t sound that great.” [Or,] “Oh, this one sounds good. Check this out—I’ll put this on my playlist on Spotify, or I’ll send this to my friend, or I’ll talk about them on my blog or on Facebook.” . . . . [T]hat is a real thing.²⁴⁰

Another interviewee concurs: “[I]f people are putting the songs on a playlist, my records are out there being compared to Drake or being compared to Beyonce, or Jay Z . . . . So, . . . high quality mixes are going to stand out more because they might be in the same playlist back-to-back with [hits by superstars].”²⁴¹

A handful of DIY artists might overcome such handicaps with an outstanding song or through sheer musical talent that outshines their recording flaws. However, they are fighting with one hand behind their back and selling short their music’s potential. Accordingly, one of our producer/engineer interviewees who works primarily with rock artists estimates that seventy-five percent of the home recordings he works on have serious technical and sonic problems that undermine the finished product. “[H]onestly, with a lot of . . . home-recorded or self-recorded things that people are sending me, 75% of it is more of a rescue job than a fine-tuning job.”²⁴² Because in his experience poor home recordings are the norm, he cautions against generalizing the likelihood of success for subpar recordings based on isolated success stories:²⁴³

Is there something that’s being done [musically in some recordings] that’s so unique that it’s going to translate no matter how it was recorded . . . ? Absolutely true, because there are very unique artists like Tune-Yards, or whoever else. But to say that the technology has come far enough that you don’t need a recording studio at all, and to get results of a certain high caliber, say, like the quality of a Pink Floyd record or Steely Dan . . . . I mean, that’s a joke, because the tracks I get sent from home recordists— . . . half the time someone’s trying to record a drum kit, it sounds awful, just flat out awful. And all I’m doing is trying to mitigate that in the mixing process.²⁴⁴

Achieving a high-quality master recording is also important to a song’s artistic success.²⁴⁵ As one of our mix engineer interviewees put it, when artists hire him to mix their song, they are demonstrating “that they care about their art [and] that they want to compete with the top people out there.”²⁴⁶ Another interviewee, a major record label executive, remarked that hiring top recording professionals to work with his artists is important not to “appease audiophiles,” but rather because surrounding the artist with top-flight talent can inspire the artist to “capture exactly the emotion and message that [the artist] set out to in the best way possible.”²⁴⁷ He continues, “[T]he experience of the recording can be heard in the final product. If [the artist] is around world class musicians and producers, the best performances come when high tide is lifting all boats.”²⁴⁸

1. Professional Roles in the Recording Process

As we noted above, accounts of digital recording in the IP literature typically gloss over the complexities of the recording process. They focus primarily on one aspect of the recording process—capturing sounds—and gloss over the other critical aspects of the production process.²⁴⁹ But as one of our interviewees observes, “Capturing and presenting is what we do with most art forms. And to think that just the capturing matters is usually wrong.”²⁵⁰ The stages in which the “presentation” of the recording are achieved—the production, mixing and mastering stages—are usually more complex and often more important than the technical capturing of sounds. Our interviewee refers to it as the difference between recording and “making a record”: “Those are two different things. Recording [is] just capturing something . . . . Making a record is a conscientious decision to present something to the world at the utmost of what it could be at that point, using any technique . . . to get there.”²⁵¹

The key steps involved in this process of capturing sounds and presenting them—i.e., “making a record”—are recording, production, editing, mixing, and mastering. These steps are sufficiently complex that in professional recording processes the roles of recording engineer, producer, editor, mix engineer, and mastering engineer are often (though not always) divided among different individuals. Below, we describe each of these roles and stages in the recording process and highlight the continuing value of professionals at each stage.

1.1 Recording Engineers

Even the “capturing” phase of recording involves more than just pressing “record.” You have to decide how many microphones you need, what kind, and where to place them. You need to adjust sound levels, minimize ambient noise, and control for acoustic reverberations. Recording engineers need a solid understanding of sound’s physical properties and the technical know-how to operate their recording equipment in the desired manner. Recording engineers work closely with the artist and producer (discussed in detail below) to capture the performances on tape or computer hard drives. Each musical element (a voice, a piano, an individual drum in a drum set) is typically isolated and recorded onto a separate audio track.²⁵²

Recording is the stage most amenable to DIY production today. Three decades ago, even recording a simple guitar-and-vocals track required renting time in a professional studio at several hundred dollars per hour. Because analog studio setups were complex, recording engineers were necessary for even the most basic tasks. Today, our interviewees largely agreed that most inexperienced home recordists can get a “serviceable” vocal recording with an adequate microphone plugged into an inexpensive computer audio interface by applying some basic, common-sense recording techniques.²⁵³

However, the more live instruments—drums, piano, acoustic bass, amplified electric instruments, strings, and so on—are involved in the recording, the more complex the process and the more likely an experienced recording engineer is needed to achieve a professional sound.²⁵⁴ Thus, genres that do not generally rely on recording live instruments, such as hip hop and electronic music, are more conducive to achieving high quality results through basic home recording. Genres such as jazz, rock, country, classical music, and so on, which typically involve recording multiple instruments with complex miking techniques, usually need engineering expertise to obtain professional results.²⁵⁵

1.2 Producers

In general, the producer functions like a director on the set of a movie or theatrical production. They supply a creative vision for the final recording and oversee and coordinate the processes to execute that vision.²⁵⁶ Legendary producer George Martin, for example, helped the Beatles flesh out ideas and improve their recordings by listening critically and then suggesting compositional enhancements, instrumental arrangements, and an overarching vision for the recording’s character and atmosphere.²⁵⁷ He helped execute that vision by composing and conducting arrangements for orchestra and other instruments, and by experimenting with recording technologies to achieve desired sounds.²⁵⁸

Several interviewees stated that the availability of inexpensive recording tools has not replaced the important role of producer.²⁵⁹ For many artists, there is still significant value in having an experienced hand working closely with the artist to listen critically, suggest musical ideas and directions, refine lyrics or arrangements, and provide an alternative source of artistic vision and inspiration.²⁶⁰ According to one interviewee, 90 percent of the musicians he works with lack the experience to “know when something isn’t right” with their song, sound, or arrangement.²⁶¹ In addition to lacking production expertise, artists often benefit from the division of labor, outsourcing production and engineering to professionals with more experience in those areas:

“[M]ost bands simply don’t have the expertise to [produce themselves], or the experience, or even want to . . . . It’s not their thing. They’re the songwriters, and maybe good performers at their instruments. And they’ve spent ten or fifteen years getting great at that. And now all of a sudden they’re being asked to . . . become an expert in this technical part, as well.”²⁶²

Expecting DIY musicians to master the complexities of home recording along with all the other tasks that digital disintermediation imposes means they have less time to focus on songwriting and musicianship.²⁶³ Artists whose heads are distracted by the technical details of recording may not deliver their best performances.

Producers allow artists the luxury of delegating these chores, enabling them to focus on their music. Producers also play an important role—again, analogous to directors—in coaxing transcendent performances. Making artists comfortable in the studio space, helping them to “get into the vibe,” and providing encouragement and constructive feedback are all part of the job.²⁶⁴

1.3 Editors

Editing has long been a part of the professional recording process. One can, for example, hear splice points in the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields” where two takes were edited together by splicing tapes.²⁶⁵ Editing audio, like editing film, is highly technical and requires significant experience to be done well. This is true even in digital audio, where poor editing can be obvious and ruin a recording.

Digital recording software makes precise editing of performances much faster and more convenient than editing on analog master tapes. However, the ability to edit out blemishes has raised audience expectations. Modern recordings are usually heavily edited to remove unwanted ambience or other sounds, pitch-correct out-of-tune notes, and time-correct out-of-time performances.²⁶⁶ Professional editors are therefore more in demand than ever.

Indeed, the prevalence of home-recording has only increased the demand for their services. Flawed DIY tracks often require extensive post-production fixes and arrive in a jumble of redundant takes that need to be painstakingly sorted and assembled. One producer bemoaned the over-reliance on editing, calling his job “exponentially more difficult” because for each project he spends an entire day “sorting through takes” and “editing performances that aren’t that great.”²⁶⁷ Another interviewee told us he now spends more time editing vocal tracks than recording them.²⁶⁸

1.4 Mix Engineers

Once a song has been arranged, produced, recorded, and edited, mix engineers specialize in blending the raw, individually recorded audio tracks (isolated instruments, voices, and other sonic elements) together with audio enhancements and effects to create a cohesive, attractive, and artistic sonic presentation, usually in stereo.²⁶⁹ Mixing is such a specialized and often technically complex process that several of our interviewees identified mixing as the stage where the absence of professional help would be most obvious to listeners.²⁷⁰ It is also a highly creative process, where inspired touches can elevate a good track into a great one.²⁷¹

Mixing includes balancing the volume levels between sonic elements and “panning” them by placing the sound at a chosen point in the stereo field (e.g. right, left, or center).²⁷² Mixing involves far more than level-balancing and panning, however. The mix engineer must fit together the elements in a production like a complex sonic jigsaw puzzle in which every piece has a distinct space and character but all are seamlessly melded into a cohesive sonic whole.²⁷³ Mixing is both technically complex and highly creative, as the mix engineer’s ultimate responsibility is to create an exciting and enveloping listening experience. As noted above, the mix engineers who work on chart-topping recordings are masters at “tickling the brain.”²⁷⁴ They create hyper-realistic soundscapes that can imbue a song with added movement and energy that maximizes its esthetic impact.

Our interviewees were uniformly skeptical about the ability of inexperienced DIY artists to make mixes that could compete with those made by seasoned professionals. Some of our interviewees pointed to a lack of access to high end recording tools as a notable limitation for DIY recordists—especially the lack of a professional monitoring environment when mixing, which can result in muddy, sonically uneven mixes.²⁷⁵ The most frequently cited obstacle facing DIY mixers, however, was the lack of experience, ear training, and understanding of how to use complex sound-shaping tools of the mix engineer’s trade, such as equalization, dynamic compression, and reverb.²⁷⁶ Used skillfully, these tools create cohesion and excitement in a mix.²⁷⁷

One of our interviewees opined that mixing “is such a specific and separate skill set” that artists and even experienced producers should usually leave it to specialized mix engineers: “Way too often the producer is trying to mix and they screw it up.”²⁷⁸ Indeed, mixing is so specialized that even professional mix engineers tend to subspecialize in discrete musical genres. For example, top mixers in the metal genre are uniquely skilled among their peers at fitting instruments and vocals around an omnipresent “wall” of heavily distorted guitars, which they describe as akin to “trains passing” or “filtered pink noise that is covering everything” else in the mix.²⁷⁹ Thus, when even A-list pop or rock engineers attempt to mix metal songs, the results “usually end up pretty disastrous.”²⁸⁰ Similarly, one of our interviewees specializes in mixing Latin music, and reggaeton in particular. She noted there are “big differences” in how Latin music subgenres are mixed, and different mixing conventions are used for salsa music created in Cuba versus Colombia versus New York, and so on.²⁸¹

Digital technologies have, if anything, made the mixing process even less amateur-friendly. There are thousands of software “plugin” modules available for mixing engineers to perform discrete mixing tasks. Plugins often present an array of virtual knobs and buttons that bewilder neophytes, with arcane labels such as “threshold,” “attack,” “knee,” “Q factor,” “pre-delay,” and so on. This vast array of digital tools enables unlimited sound-sculpting possibilities, so today’s mixers must master and stay abreast of more tools than their analog-bound forebears, whose hardware rigs offered limited sound-shaping capabilities by comparison.²⁸²

Further, the industry is trending toward new spatial audio formats that significantly increase the technical complexity of the mixing process.²⁸³ Spatial audio formats enable mixing in a three-dimensional audio environment, which requires specialized software, bespoke monitoring equipment, and require that even professionals learn a new approach to mixing. Music streaming services including Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Tidal are heavily promoting spatial audio formats such as Dolby Atmos. If Dolby Atmos succeeds as a new standard, professionals will be even more in demand and the gap between DIY and professional productions will grow.

1.5 Mastering Engineers

Lastly, mastering engineers put a final sonic “polish” on a mixed recording using tools such as equalization and dynamic range compression to create sonic cohesion between songs on an album which may have been recorded at different times and places by different people.²⁸⁴ They also enhance the overall sonic quality of the finished recording, ensure mixes sound good on a variety of playback devices from headphones to car stereos to phone speakers, and ensure sound levels meet specifications for streaming services and physical media formats such as vinyl and CD. Mastering is another skillset so specialized that some experienced mix engineers defer to dedicated mastering engineers to handle the mastering process.²⁸⁵ An independent record label executive we interviewed identified mastering as a critical stage, for which the label hires top professionals.²⁸⁶ His company pays a premium price to ensure every track on the album is perfectly calibrated and optimized for every major streaming service and all formats, including vinyl.²⁸⁷ The diversity of formats and media available today accentuates the demand.²⁸⁸

2. Will AI Replace Recording Professionals?

“Smart” software tools—touted as powered by AI—are increasingly common for mixing and mastering.²⁸⁹ These tools analyze individual tracks or entire mixes and then process them with “optimal” equalization, dynamic processing, and reverb settings for mixing or mastering. In theory, even home recordists with rudimentary knowledge could apply these plugins to a mix and automatically achieve professional results.

One of us (Priest) owns and has experimented with AI automated mixing and mastering software from several companies, including Sonible, Izotope, Apple, and Landr. At the time of this writing, AI solutions for mixing remain, in Priest’s view, far short of the promise of a fully automated mix “engineer” that can deliver results on par with top professionals. AI mixing tools analyze individual tracks and apply “optimal” processing settings for equalization, dynamics, and reverb to individual tracks.²⁹⁰ However, while AI mixing software can suggest helpful settings for individual tracks, it is presently limited in its ability to fit all those sonic “pieces” together as a finished mix without significant human involvement.²⁹¹

While AI mixing software can, in theory, select technically “correct” settings for individual tracks, that approach, in the view of top mixing engineers, is exactly the wrong way to go about mixing. According to one celebrated mix engineer, “[a] mixer’s job is to make the song work, not the mix work. The song has to feel good.”²⁹² Mixing algorithms are presently a long way from being able to “feel” the emotional effect of a mix on a listener the way an experienced professional can. Accordingly, AI mixing solutions are presently most useful as timesaving “short-cut” tools for mix engineers to set baseline equalization and dynamics processing settings—sonic “templates” for each track that are then adjusted according to the needs of the mix.²⁹³

Current AI mastering solutions are more compelling, as mastering is arguably more technical and subject to more limited variables than mixing. Mastering, therefore, is more easily automated than other stages of the recording process. Accordingly, numerous affordable online AI mastering services exist, which will analyze and digitally process an uploaded file in seconds.²⁹⁴

To assess just how effective current AI mastering technology is, one music publication compared the results of four AI mastering services with those of a professional mastering engineer.²⁹⁵ They concluded that the AI mastering results were “impressive” and “clearly a viable option” for artists.²⁹⁶ Nevertheless, the author also expressed “misgivings” because

every aspect of a music production project involves subjective judgements and choices that AI simply can’t (as yet) make. Just because the mastering stage involves a lot of technical considerations, it does not follow that the process is entirely technical—it does in fact involve just as much creativity, and just as many finely-balanced judgements, as any other stage in the production process.²⁹⁷

This is the key reason, in Professor Priest’s view, that AI mixing and mastering solutions still fall short of professional engineers: all the presently available AI solutions enable, and the finished product often requires, user customization.²⁹⁸ Without a trained ear, neophyte users will be in the same boat with or without AI assistance—most will not know how much of what kind of processing is necessary to make the mix, and ultimately the song, work.

Our interviewees expressed similar views on the limitations of AI mixing and mastering solutions. They acknowledged that AI could replace professionals who provide “cookie cutter” mixing and mastering services to DIY artists in mainstream genres such as pop and hip hop.²⁹⁹ They were unanimously skeptical, however, that algorithms will render high-level recording professionals obsolete.³⁰⁰ In their view, the more unique or cutting-edge the artist, or the less mainstream the genre, the less likely generic AI-based solutions will suffice. Several noted that art is about evolving, pushing boundaries, and creating something new—a process quite antithetical to backwards-looking algorithms trained on yesterday’s recordings. Genre-defining artists do not want their productions and mixes to derive from presets that make them sound like everyone else.³⁰¹

AI tools can handle some technical aspects of the mixing and mastering process, but cannot replace the critical creative contributions of producers, mixers, and mastering engineers. Algorithms cannot discern on an artistic level what a song, performance, or mix needs.³⁰² They cannot replace the functions of a producer: they cannot, for example, coax more evocative performances from the artist or suggest unconventional stylistic directions or arrangements for a song. Algorithms are “not going to make abstract associations to further the art” in the way that a good producer or mix engineer can.³⁰³ One interviewee referred to this as the “element of surprise” that she brings to a mix by experimenting and transgressing conventions.³⁰⁴ Another interviewee—a producer and mix engineer—observed that even in the mastering process, having a creative understanding of the producer, mixer, and artist’s intent is critical. In his experience, AI mastering solutions can easily “disrupt the intent of the mix and destroy it just like a bad mastering engineer does.”³⁰⁵ Indeed, the inherent genericness of algorithmic solutions ensures continuing demand for recording professionals.³⁰⁶ Artists who seek a creative edge will relish the opportunity to work with talented human beings for artistic collaboration and inspiration.³⁰⁷

Our interviewee who specializes in Latin music mixing also expressed concerns about the cultural hegemony inherent in presets and algorithms programmed by American software engineers: “Let’s say, for example, they they’ve input 100,000 hours of salsa music into an algorithm. How does the algorithm know there’s a difference between Panamanian salsa, NuYoRican salsa, Colombian salsa, and Cuban salsa? . . . Americans tend to frame everything into a little [stylistic box]. . . .” Until algorithms “learn to think like actual, ever-evolving humans” they will fail, in her view, to align with the nuances of a rapidly evolving global music ecosystem with borderless, genre-bending influences.³⁰⁸

In short, the hype over AI mixing and mastering tools outpaces the technological reality. It is far from clear that using AI-based mixing and mastering tools alone, at the time of this writing, can create professional-caliber results for most recordings. This may well change as technologies improve. However, the bottom line is that democratization’s dawn has yet to arrive.

3. Self-Serving Bias?

In sum, our interviewees opined that despite the widespread availability of inexpensive recording tools, recording and producing most modern music is highly complex, requiring many nuanced skillsets. While DIY artists can learn the skills to record, produce, edit, mix, and master, it takes a long time—usually years—and experience working on many projects to achieve mastery of any of the recording stages, let alone all of them. Moreover, while AI-enhanced recording software could eventually displace some professionals in the business, our interviewees unanimously maintained that the market for recording professionals will remain healthy for the foreseeable future.

Cynics may respond that, “of course your interviewees would say all that.” After all, their livelihoods depend on perpetuating a culture of dependency. Self-serving narratives founded on the mystique of sonic perfection encourage artists and labels to shell out their hard-earned earnings, which keeps such professionals employed.

To be sure, such vested interest remains undeniable. And there is doubtless some degree of psychological self-validation at play whereby professionals want to believe that their skills and expertise confer genuine benefits upon their clients. Against this, we note that many of our interviewees offer workshops or post “master class” videos teaching DIY artists home production skills. So, their interest is not entirely one-sided. Moreover, the accounts they offered us are nuanced. They noted that some tasks and some genres are more readily susceptible to DIY methods than others and acknowledged that a small minority of uniquely talented DIY artists can master the learning curve needed to produce artistically and sonically compelling recordings.

We also note that some of our interviewees comprised label executives who have a vested interest in minimizing recording budgets. For them, paying for professional recordings directly undercuts their bottom line. Especially for independent labels, controlling costs matter a lot. Yet, these executives affirmed the value of recording professionals. Their accounts largely echoed the views expressed by other interviewees. They did not deny the existence of transcendent artists that can do it all themselves, but they stated that in their experience such artists are outliers. Most of their artists benefit artistically and commercially from working with experienced producers and engineers, and thus labels continue to pay for these services.

C. Ten Thousand Musicians Can’t Be Wrong

Furthermore, even if one discounts the foregoing accounts as riddled by bias or outdated industry mindsets, the fact remains that the producer and engineers we spoke to have no shortage of paying customers. Many of these are impecunious artists who are voting with their pocketbooks in a clear signal of confidence. It’s easy for ivory-towered academics to celebrate the democratizing potential of digital home recordings. But thousands of actual musicians working in the trenches see things otherwise. That they are willing to hand over their hard-earned cash to enlist professional assistance speaks loudly to the enduring value that producers and engineers offer.

Two decades into the digital revolution, DIY music recording is hardly a new phenomenon. Aspiring musicians can choose from myriad blogs, YouTube videos, podcasts, and other “how to” guides, all of which celebrate the virtues of home recording and help aspiring musicians navigate the technical hurdles of every facet of the process from tracking to mastering.³⁰⁹ Therefore, choosing to hire professionals is hardly a matter of ignorance. Indeed, our interviewers noted that many of their clients have experimented with home recordings. Having tried the DIY route, these musicians were unsatisfied with the results and willing to put their hard-earned money on the line because they recognized that professional help would take their music to a higher level.³¹⁰

Many musicians also appreciate the value of specialization and division of labor. Sure, they could do their own home recordings, mixes, and masters. Yet, investing the time and effort required to acquire a whole different skillset and immerse themselves in the technical minutiae of audio engineering may not make sense, from the standpoint of both efficiency and cognitive demand.³¹¹ Expecting DIY musicians to master the complexities of home recording along with all the other tasks that digital disintermediation entails leaves them with less time to focus on songwriting and musicianship.³¹² As one independent label executive told us, when burgeoning DIY artists sign with her label and have access to a professional recording budget, “They’re like, `Oh, thank God, I don’t have to do this on my own anymore!’\,”³¹³

As producer and mixer Count commented, while DIY recording may be “empowering [for some], few artists truly have the resources, time, and desire to learn all phases of music production, and few artists/performers are even capable of becoming experts in all of these tasks.”³¹⁴ It’s enough of a challenge to excel at a traditional musical career without also taking on the demands of production, recording, editing, mixing, and mastering.

Artists whose heads are distracted by the technical details of acoustic engineering may not deliver their best performances. The luxury of delegating these chores to experienced professionals allows an artist to focus on their core responsibilities: composing and performing.³¹⁵ Moreover, as noted, recording professionals do more than handle the technical aspects: They can help artists improve all aspects of a song, including lyrics and arrangement, coaxing an inspired vocal performance, or functioning as a set of expert ears whose feedback and suggestions can push artists to achieve their best work.³¹⁶

The producers and engineers we spoke to are hardly a dying breed, nor are their customers drawn from a dwindling pool of deluded souls who swallowed the studio recording Kool-Aid. Tens of thousands of music producers and recording engineers ply their trade in the United States alone.³¹⁷ Indeed, the field is growing: Digital democratization has made it easy for anyone to open a virtual studio and cater to wannabe-musicians.³¹⁸ Despite this influx of competition, salaries remain robust: engineer salaries in the recording industry averaged $61,582 in 2022.³¹⁹ There is clearly no shortage of demand for their services. Far from being an obsolete industry that digital tools have supposedly replaced, the market for professional assistance remains robust. Again, musicians are voting with their pocketbooks, rejecting DIY recording notwithstanding the much-hyped promise of the digital revolution.

D. The Stubborn Persistence of Recording Costs

Our interviews shed light on the effect of digital democratization in another respect: We explored the costs and time required to complete the recording process and asked interviewees whether digital technologies had altered these metrics significantly. While interviewees gave a range of estimates, overall, their accounts suggest that, here too, the effects of digital technologies have been significantly overstated.

Contrary to the digital evangelist claims, the costs of recording have not disappeared.³²⁰ The costs to professionally record, mix, and master a music track at commercial caliber quality total easily in the thousands of dollars, with higher-end productions costing in the tens of thousands or much higher.

Our interviewees with knowledge of the subject cited $40,000–$50,000 as a typical price range for recording, editing, mixing, and mastering a ten-song album today.³²¹ Album budgets up to $300,000 are not unusual. At the highest end of the spectrum, recording budgets for premier major and independent label artists can still range from $500,000 to over $1 million per album. The bottom of the range for label album budgets, including indie and major labels, is about $20,000–$25,000 per ten-song album. The rock-bottom range cited by our interviewees for independent artists recording tracks at home without a producer but paying a mixing and mastering engineer is between $8,500–$10,000 per ten-song album for commercially competitive results.³²²

Compared to the pre-2000 analog era, costs have declined somewhat, but the savings are nowhere near as dramatic as copy skeptics suggest. Studios do charge somewhat less than they did twenty years ago, reflecting reduced equipment costs and fewer support staff.³²³ In this respect, digital technologies have had a clear effect. Tracking is also the facet of the recording process most susceptible to DIY disintermediation.³²⁴ Therefore, competitive pressures from home recording may also have played a factor.

Despite this, commercial studio space remains in high demand.³²⁵ And the costs of other professional services have hardly budged. The main costs of recording, mixing, and mastering music derives from the labor of specialized producers and engineers. These costs have not changed significantly, at least where experienced professionals are concerned.³²⁶ Public sources note that professional mix engineers charge between $100 per song for less experienced mix engineers to $3,000 per song for well-known mixers with credits on major hits.³²⁷ “Superstar” mix engineers can charge $10,000 per song or more.³²⁸ Mastering engineers charge from $25 per song for relatively inexperienced engineers to $150–$350 per song for top mastering engineers with major credits.³²⁹ Producers’ rates are more variable because some are paid with royalties, but in general, producers’ flat fees range from $100 to $1,000 per song, or considerably higher for producers with major credits.³³⁰ We also asked our interviewees about recording professional rates. Although most requested anonymity with respect to discussion of specific rates, their observations closely aligned with the rates reported above.

The continued demand for top producers and engineers has held up despite an influx of competition.³³¹ Not only do these professionals have to compete against DIY and AI-based alternatives, but the professional supply side, too, has been digitally democratized. The reduced entry costs to opening a studio or hanging a professional shingle as a producer or engineer have brought steep competition at the entry level of the market.³³² The recording industry also endured a decades-long decline of revenues due to illegal filesharing starting in 2000 from which it has only recently begun to recover.³³³ Lower revenues meant less money to spend on recording budgets.³³⁴ Accordingly, there are multiple factors potentially driving down the fees that recording professionals can charge, of which digital democratization is only one.

Despite these downward pressures in the market, as noted above, top professionals still command top dollar.³³⁵ Their time and experience cost money. Digital tools cannot replace them and deliver comparable quality, and aspiring musicians value the benefits they offer and are willing to pay for them. To be sure, critics will argue that the premium rates top engineers and producers command derives more from superstar market hype than inherent quality, and there is doubtless some truth to this. However, the fact remains: if digital technologies delivered the emancipatory solutions that pundits promised, disintermediation should have destroyed this market entirely. It manifestly has not.

Nor has technology markedly reduced the time associated with many music production tasks, which remain labor-intensive tasks and require hands-on experimentation to find customized solutions: for example, auditioning the right keyboard sounds, getting good drum and guitar sounds, working on the right/tight arrangements, and working on vocal takes and editing.³³⁶

Technology has also increased some costs. Today every note, drum hit, and vocal line can be tuned and quantized to perfection. Engineers and producers spend huge amounts of time editing sloppy instrument and vocal tracks to make them technically perfect.³³⁷ Audience ears have become accustomed to such flawless engineering.³³⁸ Thus, foregoing such optimization is not commercially viable. Technology has trained the market to set a higher bar.³³⁹

Moreover, as noted, DIY artists’ recordings typically arrive chock full of flaws.³⁴⁰ Moreover, the ability to digitally record endless takes and capture multiple tracks individually creates its own challenges. Just as our camera rolls often fill with multiple, often duplicative snapshots and selfies that take time to sort through later, so, too, editors and mixers frequently need to sort through a much bigger pile of recorded tracks than they did in the analog era where artists labored under the discipline of steep hourly studio recording fees.³⁴¹ Selecting from a patchwork of recorded stems and sounds and integrating these inputs into a coherent whole can be challenging. Stitching together different components recorded in different times and spaces whose acoustic qualities differ can cause added complications.³⁴² Thus, the time and money saved on home recording is frequently offset by increased need for editing and cleanup.³⁴³

The need to accommodate the diversity of playback media and acoustic settings that modern music consumption encompasses has also brought added challenges. In past eras, record labels focused on producing music for a single dominant format—first vinyl, then cassette tapes, then CDs. Now, people consume music in a multiplicity of formats both physical and virtual. Each streaming service employs its own compression algorithm, each presenting its own challenges.³⁴⁴ Listening devices also span a wide gamut, from cheap earbuds to sophisticated speakers. Skilled mastering engineers strive to make recordings sound equally compelling across this enormous diversity of acoustic settings and also meet the disparate technical specifications of each. Finding the right balance takes time. This, too, requires more attention and craft than in decades prior.³⁴⁵ Accordingly, a label executive we interviewed noted that high-end mastering prices have “completely ballooned over the past five to ten years.”³⁴⁶

Once again, a nuanced picture emerges—with some costs having declined, others having gone up. Overall, there seems to have been a slight reduction in the cost of professional recordings—somewhere in the range of 10–40%, but nowhere near the drastic declines that commentators claim.³⁴⁷ If digital technologies were as powerful as advertised and if the time savings they yield were as dramatic as claimed, one would expect far greater reductions. Skilled professionals might still command high hourly rates, but the efficiency gains from going digital should have sharply reduced aggregate costs. And the presumed rapid uptake of DIY alternatives should exert its own downward cost pressure. After all, if musicians could get by just fine without shelling out for professional help, they would do so, creating a demand squeeze that reduces commercial prices. That none of this has happened should cause us to question the premises of the digital democratization narrative.

The putative lower costs of DIY alternatives themselves deserve scrutiny. Copy skeptics generally describe home recording as virtually cost-free: you just need a laptop, a microphone, and some inexpensive software. To be sure, laptops and software cost a fraction of the million-dollar consoles of the analog era. However, additional start-up costs remain unavoidable. For the DIY artist who plans to record, mix, and master their music, a quality microphone, a quality analog-to-digital interface, studio monitors for mixing, and studio headphones, at a minimum, remain essential.³⁴⁸ Treating a home recording space to optimize its acoustic qualities can require further expenditures.³⁴⁹ All told, the bare minimum set-up costs for DIY recordings can easily total two to three thousand dollars.³⁵⁰ Most serious home recordists spend far more—many thousands of dollars—on higher-grade hardware and software plugins.³⁵¹ Recording more complicated music genres or larger ensembles can push costs further upward.³⁵²

In any case, the main costs of music recording—whether done at home or professionally in a studio—are bound up in time and labor costs. Time is money, and even DIY artists face implicit opportunity costs for their time. For musicians to function as anything more than casual hobbyists and position themselves for career success, the need to focus is imperative. Time spent mastering the technical minutiae and experimental craft of recording means time taken away from musicianship. As we have seen, DIY artists face a steep learning curve to get anywhere close to professional quality results. Even assuming they can master the different facets of the recording process, they are likely to spend far more time fiddling with their projects, navigating blind alleys, and grappling with the creative and technical challenges than a specialist who does this work day-in-and-day-out.

This is not to say that DIY recording is never the right path for an artist. Our interviewees cited examples of celebrated artists who achieved their distinctive sound through self-production and self-recording.³⁵³ And for some artists, having this level of control and autonomy is both empowering and rewarding. Our interviewees cautioned, however, that such artists are true outliers: only a tiny percentage of DIY artists have the natural ability and “ear” to execute on their vision more successfully than they could have done with professional help.³⁵⁴ Everyone else can benefit from the assistance of professionals to help them execute on their vision.

Veteran indie rocker David Lowery has tried both DIY recording and outsourcing to professionals. He experienced “a massive productivity loss” when trying to record on his own.³⁵⁵ He noted that

it takes me 3 days on my own to mix a single song. A professional engineer[ ] would mix two songs a day. And they would sound way better. Tracking the drums, bass and instruments is way harder. I can probably do it, but I’d be lucky to turn out a single good take in a day. Whereas [professional] engineers would turn out 2–3 a day.~[And] it would take days or a week to set up the recording equipment and get it all functioning correctly.³⁵⁶~

Lowery estimated that if you value at minimum wage the added time required for his band to self-record an album, home recording becomes a more expensive proposition than hiring studio professionals.³⁵⁷ As he summarized,

magic digital unicorns don’t change the productivity benefits of labor specialization. . . Recording music on your own laptop is more expensive than hiring specialists and renting specialized facilities. Just as raising your own chickens in your backyard is a fancy way to pay more for eggs.~. . .[W]e [shouldn’t] be surprised [that DIY recording costs more when] everywhere else in the economy we see that labor specialization leads to higher productivity and lower costs.³⁵⁸

The reality is whether recording professionally or DIY, costs have not disappeared, and they are not going to any time soon. The stubborn persistence of costs and the enduring demand for professional services dovetails with our interviewees’ accounts: far from being the magical panacea that democratization proponents claim, digital recording remains a complex process full of pitfalls and challenges that DIY artists struggle to surmount.³⁵⁹

Nor will AI necessarily prove a game-changer that alters this equation. To be sure, AI is capable of impressive creativity in the musical realm, as in many others. However, its strength lies in repackaging creative formulas that have worked in the past.³⁶⁰ True out-of-the-box innovation still requires a human touch.³⁶¹ This applies to AI-mediated recordings, as well as to compositions.³⁶² While AI generated music certainly has a host of commercial applications, it is unlikely to top the music charts any time soon.³⁶³

In any case, the best AI creativity will almost certainly come from human-machine collaborations.³⁶⁴ To be sure, sophisticated AI-mixing and mastering tools may continue to lower some of the costs of recording and improve the capabilities of DIY artists. Yet, at its core, AI is just a tool—albeit a powerful one. As we have seen with other digital recording innovation, such sophisticated tools yield the best results when used by people who have the skills and experience to harness them effectively.³⁶⁵ Recording professionals who master the ins and outs of AI systems and use them on a daily basis across a wide range of creative projects will inevitably have an edge over newbies just starting out.

AI could also increase costs and raise barriers in other ways. As we have seen already with overdubs, autotuning, and multitrack processing, the ability to do more to enhance the final product more can itself heighten the baseline expectations for the commercial state of the art.³⁶⁶ As consumers become accustomed to a higher quality acoustic experience, recordings that fall short of such heightened standards struggle to compete. The availability of AI enhancements could similarly heighten expectations and thereby widen the gap between professional and DIY recordings.³⁶⁷

At the same time, AI’s content creating potential will unleash a new flood of music that promises to expand the already staggering existing volume of new releases.³⁶⁸ Streaming platforms may favor machine music to avoid paying royalties.³⁶⁹ The abundance of content is already causing consumers to gravitate paradoxically to well-known stars and brands.³⁷⁰ Fledgling musicians will have to struggle harder than ever to be noticed. Cutting corners on recording quality and post-production refinements may prove an impossible handicap to bear in an era where real music increasingly “drown[s] in a `sea of noise.’\,”³⁷¹

AI could change music business models in other ways that widen the gulf between professional and amateur offerings. For example, the emergence of AI-enhanced virtual avatars and virtual bands could revolutionize artist-fan interactions.³⁷² Virtual concerts and other novel experiential models could allow top artists to expand their presence far more pervasively by overcoming the physical limitations that touring imposes.³⁷³ Such immersive technologies could further heighten the premium placed on high-quality recordings.

Such trends turn on the head the notion that selling music as an experiential good will replace the need to monetize recordings as a product. Copy skeptics have long argued concerts can replace recordings as the main drivers of music revenue, thereby obviating the need to restrict unauthorized copying.³⁷⁴ However, as concerts go increasingly virtual, recordings will effectively be the concert; copyrighting such assets will remain as important as ever.

New technologies could also raise costs and widen the gulf between professionals and DIY upstarts in other ways. For example, the widespread adoption of the Dolby Atmos audio format is already increasing the costs and complexity of many recording projects. Dolby Atmos “lets engineers create a listening experience more immersive than traditional stereo by placing sounds around and above the listener.”³⁷⁵ Separating sounds spatially creates an acoustic experience with enhanced depth and clarity. Such “spatial audio” recordings allow engineers to paint with a broader palette.³⁷⁶ However, as with any new technology, using it effectively requires a learning curve.³⁷⁷

Most of today’s biggest music releases already come with a Dolby Atmos mix alongside the traditional stereo version.³⁷⁸ Major streaming services such as Apple Music are incentivizing recording in Dolby Atmos through enhanced royalties, and its uptake continues to expand.³⁷⁹ If Dolby Atmos emerges as a dominant format, it could further accentuate the advantage that experienced recording professionals enjoy over hobbyists and DIY upstarts.³⁸⁰

To be sure, predicting the future of any particular technology is fraught with risk. However, the point here is merely that we should not assume that the recent trend line of reduced costs and enhanced DIY capabilities that digital technologies supplied will continue. New technologies and emerging business models could easily push in the reverse direction. In other words, the democratization of the music industry is far from irreversible.

Conclusion

Technology-enthused copyright skeptics have concocted an attractive narrative of digital democratization. In their telling, DIY musicians can rely on inexpensive software to fully replicate the capabilities of a professional studio. Freed from the oppressive hegemony of record labels and liberated from a dependence on recording engineers, digitally empowered artists can create music exactly the way they want, working at their own speed, on their own time, in their own space. Disintermediating creativity will not only put more money in artists’ pockets, it will lead to better, more authentic music. The recording industry as we know it may disappear, but society will be better off.

Like all good fables, the democratization of music has its elements of truth. Digital tools have clearly encouraged a proliferation of amateur artists and wanna-be professionals. They are turning out DIY music in huge volumes and sharing it with the world on an unprecedented scale. Such an outpouring of creative expression doubtless has intrinsic value on many levels.³⁸¹ However, if we focus on commercially viable music, that is, music that people actually listen to in large numbers, then here the democratization story falters. Very few artists are capable of self-producing music recordings of sufficient quality to compete with professionals. And audiences overwhelmingly vote with their dollars (and ears) for professional productions.

Our analysis of 766 tracks that made it onto the weekly top 200 charts from 2020 to 2023 reveals a striking absence of DIY tracks: at most one percent. In other words, the most popular music today—music that worms its way into our ears and provides the soundtrack for our daily lives—is overwhelmingly produced by recording professionals. Commentators boasting that “anyone can be the next Justin Bieber” and achieve viral success entirely on their own are vastly overclaiming. In fact, even Justin Bieber didn’t do that,³⁸² and the path to DIY success remains fraught with obstacles.

What explains this failure of digitally disintermediated musicians to crack the highest echelons? Part of the answer may be the enduring clout of record labels in pushing their product onto playlists. However, our research suggests that a bigger part of the story is the intrinsic difficulty of producing recorded music on a DIY basis. Simply put, producing high quality records is far more complicated than fiddling with a few knobs and pressing “record.” Achieving commercial quality recordings involves a technically complex, multistage process from tracking to mixing to mastering, all of which fledgling musicians struggle to master.

Nor has technology served as the leveling agent that commentators frequently claim. To be sure, digital tools, including AI, offer powerful capabilities that have lowered some barriers. Yet, using them effectively remains a time-intensive process that is as much an art as a science. Experts who use these tools day in and day out will always have an edge over those starting out, and DIY musicians seeking to be a jack of all trades inevitably end up masters of none.

This should not surprise us. The logic of specialization applies to music recording as much as to any other industry. We don’t expect film directors to simultaneously serve as cinematographers, costume and set designers, make-up artists, as well as take on all the other myriad tasks that go into making a motion picture, from screenwriting to special effects.³⁸³ We understand that delegating these responsibilities to specialists leads to higher quality movies. Why should music recording be any different?

To be sure, a few exceptional artists are capable of mastering DIY production. And doubtless some welcome the autonomy and control that producing their own recordings affords. However, for most artists, the value of delegating the technical challenges of the recording process to experienced professionals far offsets such benefits. Moreover, enlisting additional sets of ears to provide feedback and tapping the talents of multiple creative minds to polish a recorded track to perfection yields demonstrably better results, as our chart data makes clear.

Achieving even modest levels of commercial success on a DIY basis remains out of reach for most artists. They struggle to attain even the bare minimum recording quality required to compete, let alone to realize their music’s full potential. Instead, for many, the embrace of home recordings is driven by budgetary necessity more than intrinsic preference. Many artists know they risk subpar results by foregoing professional assistance. Their continued willingness to pay for professional recordings when they can afford to do so testifies to the perceived value that producers and engineers offer, notwithstanding the putative democratization of music.

In short, the digital disintermediation that pundits have predicted for over a decade remains nowhere in sight. Reports of recording professionals’ demise have been greatly exaggerated. Far from being superseded by technology, their skills remain much in demand. Moreover, contrary to commentator claims, the time and costs required to produce commercial quality records have not disappeared. Producing great music still requires great skill, effort, and time—and talented professionals still command top dollar.

Indeed, instead of empowering DIY creativity, digital technologies may supply new sources of inequality that exacerbate the gulf between amateurs and professionals. From spatial audio to AI-powered avatars, emerging new technologies are raising the capabilities threshold required for commercial success, even as generative AI spawns an ever-greater flood of algorithmic creativity to compete at the market’s bottom end. Meanwhile, the growing sophistication of virtual concerts and other immersive experiences will place an even greater premium on high quality digital recordings. As a result, recording costs in the future may well increase, mirroring the steady escalation of film budgets in recent decades.³⁸⁴

Furthermore, while this study focused on recording process, it is worth remembering that recording forms only part of the music business. Crafting hit songs often involves contributions from multiple outside songwriters. Moreover, the creative team backing successful artists typically embraces a broader ensemble of contributors—photographers, videographers, graphic artists, production designers, website managers, and social media coordinators—who nurture relationships with the artist’s fanbase. Such an assemblage of talented professionals does not come cheaply. Yet they collaborate to produce an esthetic product that the consuming public objectively values. Even with the latest AI advances, software can provide at best an imperfect substitute.

In short, the case for copyrighting music remains as robust as ever. If we want a steady supply of great new music to listen to, we need a mechanism to pay for it. Like it or not, copyright law remains the primary vehicle to fund mass-market cultural production. It fosters the constitutional mission of furthering artistic progress by awarding creators exclusive rights to harness the spending power of paying audiences.

Copyright skeptics protest that the current winner-take-all structure of creative markets is warped: They argue it showers undeserved riches on overhyped superstars, while relegating more diverse, authentic expression to the margins. Similar objections could be raised to the acoustic hyperrealities engineered by studio professionals: rather than fetishizing sound quality, shouldn’t we appreciate a great song for its own merits and ask why isn’t a good enough recording simply good enough?

Such debates need not detain us here. Suffice it to say that we live in a capitalist society, and we have a copyright system founded on market incentives. Popular music is popular, by definition, because it appeals to the most listeners. By capturing and molding the cultural zeitgeist, commercial hits embody the very progress that the copyright system is designed to reward. And for all the techno-utopian fantasies about digital democratization, professional recordings still dominate the charts.

This commercial reality remains true even as digital technologies have eroded the power of industry gatekeepers. The public are voting with their ears. Over a century ago, Justice Holmes cautioned in Bleistein v. Donaldson that “the taste of [the] public is not to be treated with contempt.”³⁸⁵ His words apply in today’s digital age as much as ever.

Appendix

This Appendix is intended to provide additional context to illuminate our reasoning about edge cases in our dataset that we ultimately chose to classify as “Not DIY.”

“Edge Cases” coded as “Not DIY” tracks

I. “Ringers” (tracks where the artist had professional recording experience)

• “Dark Red” by Steve Lacy (#82 on Spotify Top 200 week of September 1, 2023 and #40 on Spotify Top 200 week of February 24, 2023). Lacy was credited for all production and recording roles. Prior to the songs’ release, however, Lacy was an experienced professional, having acted as producer on Grammy-winning and Grammy nominated albums for artists such as Kendrick Lamar and The Internet.³⁸⁶ Although Lacy produced and recorded “Dark Red” by himself, we coded it as Not DIY because Lacy is a seasoned professional who does not represent the typical bedroom artist whom digital democratization claims contemplate.
• “Infrunami” by Steve Lacy (#122 on Spotify Top 200 week of September 1, 2023). As discussed above, Lacy was a seasoned and highly experienced professional when this track was released. So, although Lacy was the only recording professional credited on the track, we coded it as “Not DIY.”
• “Not Allowed” by TV Girl (#190 on Spotify Top 200 chart for the week of September 1, 2023). We coded this track as “Not DIY” even though band members are credited in all production and recording roles. Band member Jason Wyman, who is credited on the track as co-producer as well as mixing and mastering engineer, studied audio engineering and worked as a setup assistant at Capitol Studios prior to creating the band TV Girl.³⁸⁷
• “Shut Up My Moms Calling” by Hotel Ugly (#55 on Spotify Top 200 for the week of February 24, 2023 and #76 on Spotify Top 200 chart for the week of September 1, 2023). Hotel Ugly is an American indie duo consisting of brothers Mike and Chris Fiscella. They self-released the track in 2020, and in 2022 a sped-up version went viral on TikTok, igniting the track’s rise in popularity.³⁸⁸ Hotel Ugly is credited as the track’s producer, and no engineers or other professionals are credited. However, sources indicated that Mike Fiscella worked as a recording engineer at a studio in his hometown of Houston and was credited as recording engineer on at least one other artist’s album five years before the release of “Shut Up My Moms Calling.”³⁸⁹
• “Golden Hour” by JVKE (#15 on Spotify Top 200 the week of February 24, 2023 and #176 on Spotify Top 200 the week of September 1, 2023). Although the artist and his brother are the only professionals credited on the track, the artist had production credits on releases with well-known artists including Charlie Puth and Galantis prior to the release of “Golden Hour.”³⁹⁰
• “Big Shot Cream Soda” by $uicideboy$ (#77 on Spotify Top 200 the week of February 24, 2023). The credited producer (Budd Dwyer) is a pseudonym of one of the group members, Scott Arceneaux Jr. Arceneaux worked as an in-house producer for Universal/Republic Records prior to founding $uicideboy$.³⁹¹
• “Work Out” by J. Cole (#196 on Spotify Top 200 the week of February 24, 2023 and #189 on Spotify Top 200 the week of September 1, 2023). While the artist is the only recording professional credited (as producer), by time the track was released in 2011, J. Cole had already toured with Drake and produced a song for Kendrick Lamar.³⁹²
• “Gravity (Feat. Tyler the Creator)” by Brent Fayaz and DJ Dahi (#113 on Spotify Top 200 for February 19, 2021). DJ Dahi is one of the artists credited on the track and is also credited as the only recording professional (producer). DJ Dahi was a major producer in the hip hop and R&B world at the time this track was released, having already produced such superstars as Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Rhianna, and Big Sean.³⁹³

II. Tracks that Benefitted from Extrinsic Assistance and Advantages Inconsistent with the Digital Democratization Narrative

There were two tracks in our dataset that we considered as potential “Close Calls” but ended up coding as “Not DIY” because an outside producer was credited and substantial additional evidence suggested these tracks benefitted from extrinsic assistance and advantages inconsistent with the paradigmatic bedroom artist celebrated by the democratization narrative.

• “Hey, Mickey!” (#171 on Spotify Top 200 chart for the week of February 24, 2023) is a rap song that interpolates the famous chant, “Oh, Mickey, you’re so fine, you’re so fine you blow my mind, Hey Mickey!” from the 1982 Toni Basil hit “Mickey.” Baby Tate self-released the track in 2016, but it achieved viral fame on TikTok in 2023 after the artist already had a 2020 hit single and a record deal with Warner Brothers.³⁹⁴ Various sources credit at least one outside producer on the recording, although information about the producer(s) is sparse and inconsistent.³⁹⁵ It is possible the details surrounding production of the track might be intentionally muddled by Baby Tate’s team in crafting her narrative as a self-reliant artist. Moreover, the artist comes from a successful musical family: Baby Tate’s mother, Dionne Faris, sang on hits for the group Arrested Development and soundtracks for successful Hollywood films, and had a recording contract with Columbia Records; Baby Tate’s father is a producer and former member of the band Follow for Now, though Baby Tate claims he was largely absent from her life.³⁹⁶ Given the likelihood that Baby Tate benefitted from professional collaboration on the recording, we decided to classify the song as “Not DIY.” Moreover, the track charted only after Baby Tate achieved fame with another hit on a major label, and the viral success of “Hey, Mickey!” depended heavily on Baby Tate’s team “invest[ing] in a TikTok campaign” and “put[ting] money into outside influencers.”³⁹⁷ Therefore, this is hardly a story of a digitally empowered upstart achieving stardom entirely through her own devices.
• “death bed (coffee for your head)” by Powfu (#25 on Billboard Hot 100 the week of August 22, 2020, #31 on Billboard Hot 100 the week of May 16, 2020, #63 on Spotify Top 200 week of October 2, 2020, and #89 on Spotify Top 200 week of February 19, 2020). “death bed (coffee for your head)” shares some striking similarities with “Hey, Mickey!”: the track owed much of its success to a hook from a pre-existing song, it benefitted from the involvement of a major record label, it enjoyed TikTok virality, and the artist had famous musician parentage. Powfu had “already spent the better part of two years amassing a devoted following on SoundCloud” before he uploaded “death bed” to SoundCloud in 2019.³⁹⁸ Before “death bed” charted and was even released to streaming services, Powfu signed to Columbia Records, which cleared the Beeabedoobee sample and promoted the track.³⁹⁹ It is possible—if not likely—that Columbia used engineers to enhance and master the track pre-release but left them uncredited to preserve the track’s indie credibility. Following its major label release, “death bed” became a TikTok viral sensation. Id. “death bed” credits just two people involved in the recording: the artist and a producer named “Otterpop.” Otterpop is a beatmaker the New York Times described as “a little-known producer” at the time artist Powfu discovered and used Otterpop’s beat.⁴⁰⁰ It is unclear how much experience Otterpop had at the time he created the beat used in “death bed” (Otterpop’s earliest production credit on Genius.com is roughly contemporaneous with Powfu’s uploading of “death bed” to SoundCloud).⁴⁰¹ Otterpop’s beat (and thus Powfu’s entire track) relies heavily on a long sample from “Coffee,” a 2017 track by Beabadoobee, “a British singer who’d already had a bit of success making sweet indie pop.”⁴⁰² Indeed, the use of the sample is so central to “death bed” that Beabadoobee was ultimately credited as a featured artist on Powfu’s track. Beabadoobee’s “Coffee” itself is styled as a bedroom production by teenage artist/producer Oscar Lange, who claims to have cut his teeth as a neophyte producer working with Beabadoobee.⁴⁰³
  While one could argue that “death bed” appears to be a pastiche of stacked DIY recordings—a bedroom production by Oscar Lang sampled by possible bedroom producer Otterpop and used by bedroom artist Powfu—we think the involvement of two producers (albeit of uncertain experience) plus a major label raise significant doubts about the track’s DIY purity. Moreover, like Baby Tate, Powfu benefitted from having a rock star parent, who Powfu claimed “helped me the whole way.”⁴⁰⁴ Powfu’s father, Dave Faber, was founder and lead vocalist of the pop punk band Faber Drive that had five top 40 singles and a top ten hit on the~Canadian Hot 100 and won a Juno (Canada’s premier musical award).⁴⁰⁵ According to Powfu, his father was closely involved in his musical development and career and became his manager.⁴⁰⁶ Whether Powfu’s rock star father was directly involved in the recording of “death bed,” he clearly provided Powfu with formidable advantages in music and the industry that are unavailable to the paradigmatic DIY artist at the core of the digital democratization narrative.

III. Tracks Based on Beats by an Experienced Producer or Beat Maker

As noted above, beat makers are often credited as producers.⁴⁰⁷ In some cases (such as Star Shopping by Lil Peep), the beat maker credited as producer lacked substantial experience, and we coded these as “Likely DIY.”⁴⁰⁸ In other cases, where the beat maker already had significant professional credits, we coded the tracks as “Not DIY.” Our justification for excluding these tracks follows a logic analogous to the ringers: namely, that professional beat makers bring a level of sophistication to the recording process beyond the paradigmatic contours of the democratization narrative.

There were two such tracks in our dataset, both by artist dv4d:

• `Romantic Homicide” (#21 on Spotify Top 200 for the week of February 24, 2023, and # 85 on Spotify Top 200 for the week of September 1, 2023). Dv4d was by most popular press accounts a “bedroom” artist.⁴⁰⁹ However, the producer credited on the track, Dan Darmawan, is a beat maker who appears to have been selling his beats to artists via the beat marketplace BeatStars for at least two years before the release of “Romantic Homicide.”⁴¹⁰ One of his production credits predating “Romantic Homicide” is for the track “Casi Amor De Verano” by popular Chilean artist Young Cister, released by Sony Music.⁴¹¹ Because Darmawan sold beats professionally and had at least one major label credit at the time “Romantic Homicide” was released, we coded “Romantic Homicide” as “Not DIY.”
• “Here with Me” (#28 on Spotify Top 200 for the week of February 24, 2023). Beat maker Dan Darmawan was credited as producer and sole recording professional on this track, as well. For reasons discussed above regarding “Romantic Homicide,” we coded this track as “Not DIY.”

Tracks for Which Insufficient Information Precluded a Determination

There was one track in our dataset about which we could not find sufficient information to make any conclusions about the level of professional involvement in the recording: “be happy” by Chillhop Bandits (#8 on Rolling Stone Trending 25 for the week of October 2, 2020). We were unable to find a track titled “be happy” by an artist named Chillhop Bandits on Apple Music, YouTube, or in the Jaxsta database. It is possible that the Trending 25 chart misattributed a track by Canadian lo-fi bedroom pop rapper 347aidan, who released a track titled “be happy” in March 2020.⁴¹² However, we were unable to find any sources connecting 347aidan to “Chillhop Bandits” and thus could not confirm these were the same track, and we had no evidence otherwise indicating a misattribution. Accordingly, we left “be happy” by Chillhop Bandits uncategorized and we disqualified the track from our dataset.

Even if the “Chillhop Bandits” entry on the Rolling Stone Trending 25 chart is a misattribution of 347aidan’s “be happy,” the 347aidan track’s DIY status is indeterminate. 347aidan’s “be happy” credits only one individual—the artist as songwriter—and credits no one under the production and engineering category, including no credits naming the artist themselves in a production or engineering role. Because no one is officially credited in a production or engineering role and we found no external sources crediting the artist in those roles, the DIY status of 347aidan’s “be happy” is ambiguous. By contrast, the Plausibly DIY recordings we discuss above all credit someone in a production or engineering role, even if that individual is the artist, with the exception of Grupo Frontera’s “No Se Va,” for which we found external corroboration of the track’s DIY origins.⁴¹³