| Illustration: (Vicky Leta) |
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Tired of Taylor Swift? Far be it from us to promote such blasphemy. But if you need a break from the canon of Tay, you have options. |
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An average of 112,000 tracks were uploaded to music streaming services each day in the first half of 2023, meaning roughly 40 million songs became potential playlist tracks last year. That's a startling statistic, and you can draw a straight line from it back not to 1989 but to 1991. That's when two tech-savvy musicians from the San Francisco Bay area introduced the world to Pro Tools, a software program to capture, edit, and produce songs digitally—with no more need for clunky tape decks or the giant mixing boards previously required for professional-grade recordings. Now the recordings could be visualized, too, with waveforms showing how the sound changes over a specific interval of time. |
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Pro Tools eventually spawned an entire industry of rival "studio-in-a-box" programs, which in turn spawned recordings from bedrooms and university dorms the world over. (Not long after came the rise of file-sharing programs like Napster, followed by streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music.)
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As the rise of artificial intelligence raises new questions about the music industry's ability to adapt or even survive in the face of another radically disruptive technology, it's worth looking back at how the original digital audio workstation conquered, and changed, a global art form.
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4 trillion: Estimated number of on-demand audio streams initiated globally in 2023, according to entertainment-industry data provider Luminate |
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$2.95 billion: Estimated size of the global market for digital audio workstations in 2023, according to Fortune Business Insights |
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$99: Yearly price for Pro Tools Artist, the cheapest Pro Tools subscription fee |
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$599: Yearly price for Pro Tools Ultimate, the company's priciest subscription plan |
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$417.4 million: Total 2022 revenue reported by Pro Tools parent company Avid Technology, which also makes the popular movie-editing program Media Composer |
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$1.4 billion: Amount private equity firm STG agreed to pay to acquire Avid in 2023 |
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Few industries ride the nostalgia wave as gracefully and as frequently as the music business. Here are vinyl sales, resurging yet again; there are the Rolling Stones, dropping a new album yet again. What rarely emerges when music aficionados wax nostalgic is anything having to do with tape, and there's good reason for that. |
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Prior to Pro Tools, music was recorded onto spools of plastic coated with magnetic material, which captured sound waves converted by a microphone into an electrical signal. This "tape" could then be run across another magnet to reproduce the signal, which could be converted back into a soundwave by running it through a speaker.
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Compared to digital audio files, tape is easily damaged. It can't be backed up. It can get twisted or warped, and it literally required splicing with a razor blade if you wanted to replace a segment of one take with a segment from another. Pro Tools solved for all of this by capturing music in a digital format, and then showing what it recorded on a graphical interface, where audio could easily be spliced, compressed, and manipulated in an untold number of ways through various plug-ins (autotune, for example). As a result, today we can enjoy all kinds of music that would have been impossible to create in an analog world.
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"It's really hard when you record to tape to make 10,000 copies of that… whereas now, if I make a digital recording, I can put it online and a million people could listen to it tomorrow."
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—Composer Nathan Prillaman, faculty member at the Center for Innovation in the Arts at Juilliard, speaking about teaching and working with Pro Tools on "Pro Tools: Making Waves," the latest episode of the Quartz Obsession podcast, which was mixed with Pro Tools! |
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How many of the 10 Grammy nominees for 2022 Record of the Year were made with Pro Tools?
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Fast forward to the bottom to get your answer!
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In 2001, just 10 years after its debut, Pro Tools won a special Grammy for Technical Achievement—a category that's typically (but not always) reserved for human winners.
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| Screenshot: (YouTube/AJR) |
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Ryan Met of the band AJR shares a production breakdown (and the Pro Tools window on his laptop) for the song " World's Smallest Violin." |
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Take me down this 🐰 hole! |
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The creators of Pro Tools, Bay Area musicians Peter Gotcher and Evan Brooks, originally went into business not as software designers but as chip sellers. In the 1980s, they opened up the digital drum machine they used in their jam sessions and figured out how the Drumulator's chips stored the available sounds. Inspired by this, they hacked together a machine to digitize recordings of new drum sounds, which in turn inspired them to make and sell chips programmed with all kinds of music. As Yamaha and other manufacturers started incorporating this kind of technology in their machinery, demand for Gotcher and Brooks' DigiDesign chips took a nosedive. But in a lucky turn of events, Apple was courting Mac developers to create all kinds of apps, and Gotcher and Brooks got involved early. Their Sound Designer program, which allowed users to edit digitized sound, became a precursor to Pro Tools, which they rolled out soon after. |
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Have programs like Pro Tools made it too easy for the masses to record music?
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- Yes, a laptop does not a songwriter make.
- No, down with the music industry gatekeepers!
- Who cares? I only listen to Taylor Swift anyway.
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In our last poll, about holiday hits, 58% of you used your streaming gods' wish to delete the song "Mistletoe" by Justin Bieber. |
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Today's email was written by Heather Landy (recorded to tape back in the day, still has the mangled cassettes as a keepsake), edited by Susan Howson (digitally records Heather when she doesn't realize it), and produced by Morgan Haefner (wonders if someone is recording her). |
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The answer to the quiz is D., All 10 of them. It goes to show just how dominant Pro Tools is in the professional music world (and by the way, Silk Sonic won that year for the track "Leave the Door Open"). |
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