Commercial tracking — selling and producing tracked music

Can a module be a product? traxweekly argued it out in October 1997 – January 1998 after Behemoth's "The Scene and the Commercial Market". The useful residue is a list of real cases, a production workflow for release-quality renders, and the recurring objections.

The objections (Behemoth, October 1997)#

Tracking is underground by birth and done for fun, not money; the software is DOS-based and hard; the public does not believe computers make music; "you cannot perform tracking live"; and the industry takes no risks, leaving small labels such as maelcum's Area 51 Records to carry the load (source: s-tw114-commercial-tracking-debate).

The cases#

• Film: Chris Jarvis (Analogue) tracked the opening and closing music of Purgatory, an 18-minute short screened in Adelaide (source: s-tw114-commercial-tracking-debate).
• Club label: a Canberra DJ duo signed to a major Australian dance label, working on an AWE64 Gold with impulse-tracker; their files are too big for FTP and are not released free because the samples and sequencing could be copied (source: s-tw114-commercial-tracking-debate).
• Gabber: Nasenbluten (Bloody Fist Records) produce on protracker on Amigas and get paid; live, one operator on the Amigas into a cross-fader with a DJ scratching over it (source: s-tw114-commercial-tracking-debate).
• Indie label / CD single: Dilvish's radio version was heard as MP3 by label owners who did not know parts were tracked — "the tools you use to create music don't mean a lot to consumers" (source: s-tw114-commercial-tracking-debate).
• CDs of tracked tunes "a bit mastered afterwards" (Maz); OctaMED PC in shops (source: s-tw114-commercial-tracking-debate).
• Competitions and demotapes: Exxon's first place in an Austrian electronic-music compo with a ten-track XM; his advice — indie labels or your own, real-life compos, demotapes everywhere (source: s-tw115-tracking-semantics).
• The cautionary tale: a contest winner recorded at Wisseloord Studios by plugging a PC running fasttracker-2 into the desk; the CD kept the ticks and noise of his 8-bit, 22 kHz samples, which the studio could not remove (source: s-tw114-commercial-tracking-debate).

Precedents in the interviews, 1995–98#

The 1997 debate had a prehistory in the interviews; the same three motives — games, records, and protecting a free tune from commercial theft — recur from 1995 on.

• 1995. blaze-runner (PURE, Belgium) registered his tunes with SABAM for a commercial project, prepared a vinyl release through a small label (a tape with the producer, artist name undecided), planned to publish tunes online "with all the references" so buyers could find him, and reported scene tunes turning up in films and clubs — the registration was insurance against tunes "ripped by unscrupulous people" and released commercially; friends Piet and Phil of PURE had already released on the label (source: s-tw008-interview-blaze-runner). Scene musicians earning from software: ryan-cramer sold DataView and Timeless for Windows; stalker expected a game soundtrack and a CD; claim had prospects with Progressive Media and a 3DO studio (sources: s-tw007-interview-ryan-cramer, s-tw004-interview-stalker, s-tw015-interview-claim). mesonyx, 15, wrote the three Xixit tunes in one day after begging for a job in #coders (source: s-tw028-faces-in-the-crowd-mesonyx). Late 1995: blackwolf — the scene is heading "towards commercialism … not just with the parties, but the people too"; "Guys like Straylight have already taken the lead with beating Origin over the head with their music" (source: s-tw040-interview-blackwolf); vicious — a house producer aiming at a record deal, "demo music won't get me a record deal" (source: s-tw031-interview-vicious); loki — "midi is too expensive, and analog sounds so much better", some company will pay the best trackers, with the risk of "a big exploit like 2 Unlimited" (source: s-tw035-interview-loki); deus-ex — music as "a very passionate hobby" beside a graphics business, tempted by a contract (source: s-tw034-interview-deus-ex).
• 1996. balrog (January): modules belong in games — better than General MIDI, "MUCH smaller than pre-recorded songs", and they free CD-ROM bandwidth for video (source: s-tw042-interview-balrog). ganja-man (15) was writing music for a game; daedalus had game-music negotiations; acidfrog aimed at a 12" and a label; Balrog at vinyl/CD by the end of 1996 (sources: s-tw052-interview-ganja-man, s-tw052-interview-daedalus, s-tw044-interview-acidfrog, s-tw042-interview-balrog). u4ia: demo tapes to labels went unanswered; he refused £200 per tune from a band; the goal is "to make a living writing music. And that's it."; paid BBS/CD-ROM access to free modules is "nothing more than theft" (source: s-tw067-interview-u4ia). vegas: "If I have to use my computer to make money, thats not the way to do it" (source: s-tw062-interview-vegas).
• 1997–98. perisoft (January 1997): impulse-tracker is "the only tracker that can make a truely CD quality song (by diskwriting and support of huge samples)"; his band's 75 MB wave files were not for scene release (source: s-tw087-interview-perisoft). khyron (1997): a label demo CD would "probably not" contain tracked music — "I'd want it to sound as clean as humanly possible", and a 1 MB GUS leaves no room for 44.1 kHz samples (source: s-tw111-interview-khyron). mental-floss (February 1998): tracked music can be played live "but playing live isn't a requirement of commercial viability"; commercial exploitation "started 2 years ago"; trackers give "studio-style quality (or at least close) music that will sell … And the cost of creating the music is free"; he used other names for "commercial cheeze" (source: s-tw119-interview-mental-floss).

Producing a module for release (MarkVM's recipe, January 1998)#

1. Forget scene file sizes; use as many samples per instrument as possible (multisampling), all 16-bit / 44 kHz — "especially with acoustic instruments such as pianos".
2. If sample memory runs out: build the high-quality instrument and save it; delete samples and downsample the rest into a low-quality twin saved under another name; compose with the low-quality twin, then swap the high-quality instrument back in when the sequencing is done, even if the song no longer plays in real time.
3. Save as .XM and render to .WAV; treat the wave in Cool Edit or Sound Forge — reverb, boosts, filters; go out through a digital output to a recorder for the CD master (source: s-tw114-commercial-tracking-debate).

Maz's reminders: trackers beat samplers for speed of idea capture but bass "hasn't got exactly that much power" and residual noise remains (source: s-tw115-tracking-semantics); authors of free trackers stop developing after a year or two "because they need money to live" (source: s-tw114-commercial-tracking-debate).

Related#

live-tracking · tracker-scene-history · multisampling · tracking-workflow · maelcum · sample-ripping · blaze-runner · mental-floss

Sources#

s-tw114-commercial-tracking-debate · s-tw115-tracking-semantics · s-tw114-live-tracking · s-tw008-interview-blaze-runner · s-tw007-interview-ryan-cramer · s-tw004-interview-stalker · s-tw015-interview-claim · s-tw028-faces-in-the-crowd-mesonyx · s-tw040-interview-blackwolf · s-tw031-interview-vicious · s-tw035-interview-loki · s-tw034-interview-deus-ex · s-tw042-interview-balrog · s-tw052-interview-ganja-man · s-tw052-interview-daedalus · s-tw044-interview-acidfrog · s-tw119-interview-mental-floss · s-tw111-interview-khyron · s-tw067-interview-u4ia · s-tw087-interview-perisoft · s-tw062-interview-vegas