I’m surprised it’s only two orders of magnitude. Compared to today, it was insanely expensive to record music professionally more than 20 years ago, especially when the recoding is more than a single microphone (or stereo pair) capturing a complete live performance in a single take.
There would be orders of magnitude more music published today because the tools are so cheap and available.
What you can do today with $2,000 of equipment is better in every single metric than what you could do in 1990 with $20,000 of equipment. (I’m excluding the costs of studio space here for simplicity, as that can be highly genre dependent: on one hand the cost of concert halls for a symphony orchestra probably hasn’t changed much; on the other hand new electronic music doesn’t need a physical studio at all.)
I don’t know about the economics of recording back in 1960 but I can say with confidence that even the absolute best equipment found in the top studios would be technically inferior to today’s $2,000 electronics. (Though they did use their genius to innovate sounds which we still love to emulate today, so those old studios may well be creatively superior. But we have all that creativity in the form of plugins and effects today.)
>I don’t know about the economics of recording back in 1960 but I can say with confidence that even the absolute best equipment found in the top studios would be technically inferior to today’s $2,000 electronics.
While this might be true for recording media (e.g. a DAW with high end SnR vs 4-track tape overdubbed to death), we still use e.g. the same microphones as back then, and they're still expensive. Ditto for all kinds of analogue musical instruments (guitars, pianos, etc).
>Ditto for all kinds of analogue musical instruments (guitars, pianos, etc).
Quality guitars, amps and microphones are vastly cheaper, because of the astonishing improvements in automation and far-eastern manufacturing. A $400 Squier Vintage Vibe strat is 95% as good as an American Fender strat from 1990, at about 20% of the cost in real terms. Budget condenser microphones simply didn't exist before the mid-80s, so you'd need to spend about $2,000 for a decent LDC mic; today you can get a very good LDC from Rode, SE or Aston for about $300. The same goes for headphones, monitors, outboard and all sorts of other gear - it's just ludicrously cheap in historical terms. A grand piano is still an expensive item, but you can get a beautifully detailed and utterly convincing multisampled piano plugin for under $100.
>"we still use e.g. the same microphones as back then, and they're still expensive"
Good microphones were almost prohibitively expensive in the old days. Today you can buy something like an SM57 for €100, and that's normal retail price, no special offers or anything. Second-hand, they're usually less than half that.
Decent acoustic guitars can be had for less than €200, brand new. Sure that won't be a fancy name-brand guitar, but it'll sound good and play well.
All kinds of great outboard gear like the FMR Really Nice Compressor is €200, and it's one hell of a piece of gear, even at twice that price. Combine with an inexpensive mixer with decent preamps, and you're already well on your way. Yes, even Behringer is decent these days.
And you can run a pro-grade DAW like Reaper on an ordinary run-of-the-mill PC. An audio interface with a good amount of input channels is going to cost a bit, but if you're OK recording one or two tracks at a time, a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 is €120. And even inexpensive studio monitors have astoundingly good sound quality, compared to what people used to swear by.
True, but today's cheaper gear and instruments are much much better than back then, if even they existed. I keep reading nothing but positive comments about this brand (no affiliation whatsoever) http://kaminstruments.com/index.htm
Also cheap electronics makes diy solutions more affordable. One could mike a drum set using cheapo low end Behringer dynamic mics paired with a self built preamp to get very good results for the money.
There would be orders of magnitude more music published today because the tools are so cheap and available.
What you can do today with $2,000 of equipment is better in every single metric than what you could do in 1990 with $20,000 of equipment. (I’m excluding the costs of studio space here for simplicity, as that can be highly genre dependent: on one hand the cost of concert halls for a symphony orchestra probably hasn’t changed much; on the other hand new electronic music doesn’t need a physical studio at all.)
I don’t know about the economics of recording back in 1960 but I can say with confidence that even the absolute best equipment found in the top studios would be technically inferior to today’s $2,000 electronics. (Though they did use their genius to innovate sounds which we still love to emulate today, so those old studios may well be creatively superior. But we have all that creativity in the form of plugins and effects today.)