There’s something about a hard copy, CD, or vinyl (welcome back, LPs—it’s like you never left!). Even as we’re being pushed to let go of that concrete thing we can hold in our hands, its gravitational pull is just too strong to resist.
It’s all that nostalgia and history embedded in the format—something we so much want to be a part of. As for those hard copies, their printed material must be finalized and perfected for production—typos and color correction avoided at all costs—because, unlike with digital, there are no post-publication edits. All of that stress is worth it for its cool retro feel—part of the glory days of recorded music, when rare talent was what labels and their A&R scouts were all on the hunt for.
Well, that train has left the station, people, and digital has opened the doors to everyone.
Any release can come out in formats ranging from a digitally streamed single to albums appearing on YouTube, vinyl, CD, and the many streaming sites, depending on your genre and recording resolution—the possibilities are overwhelming. Yet nothing quite compares to that hard copy—something you can hold in your hand. Your alter ego awaits.
A physical recording is a kind of badge—a milestone in a burgeoning career. In essence, it represents the artist; it’s a duplication of your art that says you’ve accomplished something tangible. With music being this ethereal thing, a CD or LP is one of the ways we get to hold onto something real, in all its undeniable substance.
Links are cool, hard copies are cooler. We can’t seem to let them go. Even as the doors to digital open wider and wider, we keep hanging onto that stone tablet with the stories etched into it—that hard piece of rock.
In order to fully fathom what going all-in on digital means, let’s look at the consequences. It’s not like we are going to go backwards, but seeing what we might be leaving behind is worth noting. You can’t get the live concert experience from a digital bit, no matter how high the resolution is. The original ad for analog tape was, “Is it live or is it Memorex?” That was brilliant, but it was never going to be true.
So then, why does it matter what medium we choose for a recording or where it is released if it’s all just a fake representation of the real thing? What’s important is just having something to show, right?
Let’s step back a little and take a look at the bigger picture—what this is all leading to.
It’s worth gaining some perspective to see what we are actually feeding into and being part of creating, as we add to the black hole of recorded media. It’s already looking like an infinitely expanding library of content, where each contribution is almost instantly lost in the vastness and then absorbed into a massive, endless pit.
Music then becomes the proverbial canary in the coal mine. What we risk losing in this push toward complete digitization is the essence of music: its organic nature, how it communicates, brings people together, and transcends language. This fragile, human connection is what we need to maintain and keep sacred.
Books seem to be on a similar track. They are a close second—having gone through many incarnations prior to the newer digital formats: everything from scrolls and lotus leaves to the ability to have thousands of e-books in the palm of your hand. At one point it looked like books were going away. They still might, but that physical experience of the modern codex has the feel of a perfect delivery system for accessing a string of thoughts. Our attachment to the book as an object is still greater than the pull toward its digital future.
The written word has come a long way since the great oral traditions of the works of Homer and the Vedas, each consisting of several thousand lines of text transmitted orally and committed to memory through rhythmic patterns and tonal structures. Whether it was poetry in the form of dactylic hexameter for Homer, or a set of chants for the Vedas, these were technologies for memorizing massive amounts of information. And like music—which was and is a technology for storing information—they work with our brains through rhythm and pitch, using patterns that are organic to our physical cognitive processes.
So you could say that music was the original technology, not just for storing information, but also for transmitting it. Music is where information technology all began.
Until and unless something more radical evolves out of all of this, the digital frontier is the way forward. The question is: where does it end?
The world we live in has been transformed into two distinct realities, each with its own domain: the physical and the digital. Over time, the digital versions of things have imperceptibly replaced much of the day-to-day—how we communicate, work, and play—forcing a complete shift in how we function and interact, where eye contact is more often made with screens than with each other.
This shift toward technology-driven versions of ourselves has created a tension between the physically constructed (the things we build with our hands) and the digitally construed (the world as viewed and experienced by way of technology)—which, taken together, have manifested an existential divide: a place where we are living life increasingly disconnected from ourselves and each other.
We are physical beings in a physical world. It still isn’t clear whether the synthetic virtual world has anything in common with a spiritual sensibility—or whatever you want to call consciousness. Here is the dilemma we are creating: As we become more dependent on living in the digital world, what meaningful experiences of life—the stuff that makes us grow and become better people—are we losing through all of this?
When we transform the very precious art of music into a digital medium, we end up with a hybrid of its original form. It’s no longer the actual created music but a look-alike. Is this where we start losing the human connection so present in music, as we continue to adapt to this ever-changing version?
It’s not just the human factor that’s missing, but also all the sensory experiences that are being negated. Even listening itself takes a hit because removing sound from the experience of actually being there causes our brains to work overtime to fill in what is only being suggested.
And yet, in the realm of artistry, we still want to see the physical work—something that leaves a mark: Michelangelo was here. It goes deep with us, like some part of our primordial selves. The need to keep that tangibleness is part and parcel with how our senses connect with the physical world.
At the same time, music brings us closer to something supernatural. It has the power to transport and transform us, all through the invisible vibrations of sound.
If math is the language of the universe, a way to describe the physical world in abstract terms, then music is the art understood through mathematical patterns, existing in a purely intangible, metaphysical realm.
The digital transformation of music is almost a natural one—except for that whole analog versus digital discussion, which is still a very, very big deal.
With the pace of our collective metamorphosis in overdrive, moving from the physical to the digital world, we can see that all of this is pointing toward where things are going—where we are going.
Questions like: Will we have time to get it right? Is it natural for us to be moving this fast? We almost don’t have time to answer. Change is coming, regardless.
The origin story of humanity is one of continuous evolution. For millions of years, we have followed a biological imperative. And where has that gotten us?
Maybe the artificial world will help us move together in a positive trajectory. There has to be something better than circling the same unfortunate outcome—division, with large populations in despair.
All of this connects back to music—a technology we use to express who we are in metaphysical terms. Music points us to our higher self.
Music is an oracle, revealing who—or what—we might evolve into as we move further from our authentic self and deeper into a virtual existence.
Stanley Kubrick made us look into the connection between human evolution and our place in the universe in his monumental joint venture with futurist Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey. What we really want to know is this: Can we live on as virtual beings, having a conscious awareness and senses that extend beyond our mortal physical bodies? Will existence, in some form or another, even be able to hang on—with or without Earth as the mother of us all?
Who knew that recording had such dire implications!
At the point where we are no longer rooted in the physical, what role does music have for us?
For now, it seems music is being taken out of its physical, organic experience, and we are being asked to let go of that live, living context where music is made for us. What exactly will we still need if we become pure artificial consciousness, existing on energy supplied by solar-like cells?
The break with the physical seems to come down to how we actually use our minds, and what we are left with once so much of what we use our minds for is handled by the artificial version that is propagating faster than is almost possible to conceive.
All that extra brain power we supposedly don’t use—that brain real estate just sitting there like an undeveloped landmass—represents what we might have the capacity for when we enter an afterlife as physical-digital beings. Don’t quote me, but if you’re not seeing this coming, you may be sparing yourself the unfolding of an inevitable future reality, where death is just the beginning of your new artificial consciousness.
If we lose the physical connection to music, the result is that we lose the thread that gives it meaning. And if it no longer has meaning, then who exactly are we? This is the path we are on as digital explorers, seeing how far we can go in replacing ourselves.
Music is a reminder of what we are and how we experience; it is life in the moment, the nowness of how we experience life. When we convert music to a recording, it becomes memorabilia—a nostalgia that just follows us around from place to place. At some point, we are going to have to let all of that go into some sort of catalogue of memories.
The big fallback for us from all this replication of art, the hybridization of art, and the rise of all things digital is Nature.
Nature is the pure and existential physical world, where being human finds its deepest meaning.
Existing in nature is existence itself—a timeless moment of pure experience. Music has so much in common with nature because it reflects this moment of experience, and we feel it physically. Musical instruments—the tools we use to make music beyond the human voice—are crafted from nature using physics and math.
To really experience music, you have to be in the room. The acoustic experience is what sends those organic vibrations out into a physical space. It’s the same as taking a walk in the forest; all that goodness pours into every cell of your being—that is the acoustic concert experience.
Still, recorded music is an inseparable part of life. The global recorded music industry was worth just south of $30 billion this year. And while artists see less and less of this revenue—because when the art is no longer live, someone else controls the product—the industry continues to grow every year. (For context, classical music accounts for less than 1% of this total.)
So then what about recording?
From production to post-production, the art of recording is a created illusion. It’s part magic and part imagination. The recording gear and venue are the magician’s props, while the engineer uses the artist’s wizardry to craft something extraordinary.
It may look like sleight of hand, but great recordings are transformative. The listener experiences the end result, fulfilling the cycle—the real reason we record: to document all of that miraculous conjuring.
And as Sam Spade said, referencing Shakespeare, “It’s the stuff dreams are made of.”
In this musical life, we must record. It’s the only way to be part of the physical creative world—the same as authors, painters, designers, and architects: the arts captured in their physical form. Recordings give music a physical identity—on par with the rest of the arts.
If you want to talk recording or recordings, Michael Fine is the person for that in my book—the Grammy Award-winning producer and now prolific composer. If you knew what he knows…
Kathy Geisler One thing I’ve noticed lately is that there’s an absolute swarm of recordings happening. It seems like there are more classical music recordings than ever before, all appearing on different platforms—we are being bombarded.
Michael Fine Yes, there’s actually a corollary to that. When I was growing up, there were recordings only by the most important artists—or at least those we were told were the most important. But if I look, for instance, at my grandpa’s collection of 78 RPM records, it was Toscanini and things like that—and that was it.
Part of it was because it was difficult and costly to make recordings—and don’t even talk about post-production because there was limited post-production in those days. The other thing was that it was controlled by a small group of international labels, none of which exist anymore, except in name only.
It’s very easy to make a recording. You can publish it digitally on all the most important digital channels. Physical product is not really that important anymore. It’s certainly important in Asia, for people to get autographs. But I think it’s a good thing.
The result is that, actually, not only are there more people making recordings, but more people have access to the music than there used to be. Before Amazon and mail order—and before streaming—you had to have a record store. And record stores had very limited offerings of classical music outside of the major cities.
I remember when I was working at Deutsche Grammophon in the ’90s, someone wrote to Anne-Sophie Mutter, an artist I produced, and said, “I really love your music. Where can I find it? How do I get it?”
Well, it was complicated. This person had to find a shop—had to make a trip to Toronto, as it turned out, to a store called Sam the Record Man to buy the recording. They weren’t even doing mail order at that point, I guess.
Nowadays, everybody has access. If I look at my audience for my compositions on Spotify, they’re all from Turkey, at least the majority of them. Ten cities in Turkey. They would have never had any knowledge that I even wrote music, but someone liked something they heard and they told their friends.
Now I have this small fan base of people from Turkey who like the Suite for Strings. The blossoming of recording and availability, I think, is a wonderful thing, and it’s thanks to the implosion of the big labels, to a certain extent.
KG My question is: say you’re one of these people who found a church with a reasonable sound, and knew a nice guy with a computer, nice headphones, and some decent mics. This guy made your recording and edited it because he had that software on his computer. Then you found a label that would take it and put it out, no strings attached—“Just take my recording and put your logo on it.”
So now you’ve got this recording. It’s not really about making money, that’s for sure. It’s about: “Hey, I exist. I’m out there. I want to get seen. I want to be heard.” And it’s not even a physical recording. You have to send it in some link or something to people—and what else can you do with that recording?
I’m leaning on the answer of PR—of what stands between you getting it out there. How do you get the word out properly? You go to a PR person and they say: “Okay sure, here’s our deal. We will get the word out about your recording for six months. It’ll cost you $5,000 to start. And we’ll do x, y, and z.” And you think: Okay, well, what can I do?
I see these things all day long coming across my social media. Your new recording is coming out and… okay, is that all you’re going to do? So what can these people do? It’s not like the old days where you could turn on the radio, send your disc to the station, and they might play it—maybe a couple hundred thousand people would hear it at 3:00 p.m. during drive time.
MF Yeah, well, that’s a really good question. And I would say the answer is different in every country. That’s something else to be aware of: what works in the United States doesn’t necessarily work in South Korea, or China, or Russia.
Also, the United States is one of the smallest per capita markets for the sale of classical music recordings in the world. It’s surpassed by many nations with smaller populations—and, I would say, with deeper cultural interests in the classical arts.
But let’s go back to your hypothetical person.
First of all, I hate recording in churches. But that’s just me.
I always say, before you make a recording—no matter who you may talk to—you’d better have a really good reason to make it, because you’re actually starting a huge process. It’s not just about making the recording, but about getting it into people’s hands.
A lot of people think that because they’ve made a recording, it’s going to be a game changer. I can think of at least 15 artists I’ve worked with over the past few years who have said, “Oh yes, my recording is going to be a game changer for my career.” It’s not, usually. It’s a calling card. It’s an important marketing tool. But anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. So, let’s go back.
You’ve got this recording. Okay, so depending on where you are—for example, if you’re a Korean artist—it’s very possible that you can get one of the legacy labels based in Korea—Sony, Warner, Universal—to take the recording. Or maybe not. You can also post it yourself via a company like Tunecore, on Spotify, Apple Music, etc. It’s a lot of actual work.
The most important international promotional tool is YouTube. You have to have video. Many times, when I talk to a conductor about an artist, the first thing they’ll do is go to YouTube and look for something they can listen to for five seconds—and make a very quick decision. So, that’s important.
You mentioned radio in the United States. There’s a gentleman named Max Horowitz, with a company called Crossover Media, who, for as long as I can remember, has been sending people’s recordings to radio stations and getting them played. It’s a very excellent thing to do in most European countries.
It’s a little different there—you have big national radio services like Radio France and Radio Classique, which is a sort of pop-light version of France Musique. In the UK, you have, of course, BBC Radio 3, and you have Concert FM. So, those are easy to service in a way—and to get them your recordings, you need a network.
Building your network as a young artist is so important.
Every single person you’ve ever worked with—any conductor, any orchestra, any organization—those people are your first line of contact when you’re talking about your recording.
But when I said you’d better have a really good reason to make the recording, it should be repertoire you truly feel you have something important to say about. You shouldn’t think about what the labels will want, because they don’t really matter so much anymore. No disrespect intended to the labels I work with.
You really don’t have that many shots to get it right, so it should be music you have a very powerful connection to. And when you make that recording, don’t do it in the cheapest way possible. Don’t just say, “There’s a nice church and a guy with a few microphones.” Really find out what the best way is for you to make the recording.
I have a lot of friends who make recordings on the run, without a producer, and then I get an email saying, “Can you put this recording together?” I listen to it and realize that if a producer had been there, the material to work with would have been much better. I generally have to say, “No, I can’t help you with this because the recording was improperly produced to begin with.”
There are many, many factors involved in deciding to make a recording. Number one: choose the repertoire that has the most meaning for you. If you believe in that music, and you believe in that repertoire, and you really, indeed, have something to say about it, this will probably resonate with someone else.
Number two: make sure that you make the recording in the best possible way. And if you can’t afford to hire a producer, have someone—a musician friend—listen carefully and stop you, because there may be things you’re not hearing yourself.
Your preparation for a recording is very different from your preparation for a concert. In a concert, you will get away with mistakes if you communicate something about the music. A recording generally has to be perfect, which, again, can be accomplished with repeated takes and editing. This is what people expect nowadays.
Then, when it’s done, you have to make a decision: Am I going to publish this myself? Am I going to look for a label? Nowadays, labels generally take recordings on spec—except for the biggest artists.
You can take your recording to almost any label in the world and say, “Would you like to have this for free?” because labels rarely pay for recordings anymore. At that point, your work really begins, because once the label takes it, it’s very unlikely they’re going to do much to promote it. You’re going to have to do most of that yourself.
I had a call from a wonderful artist; she was so excited. She’d been signed by “Sony Classic.”
So my first question was, “You mean Sony Classics Netherlands?” She said, “I don’t know. Is there a Netherlands?”
“Yes, they only manufacture their recordings in and for the Netherlands.”
So, okay, let’s assume it’s Sony Classics International. If it is, the contract may guarantee physical distribution in only five countries—you have to look at that.
But whatever it is you sign, that’s when your work begins—because you are going to be responsible for promoting the recording and promoting your own artistry.
When I think about my day, you know, as a composer, I could spend two or three hours doing nothing but sending my scores out to people. Now, that’s not a lot of fun. I’d rather be writing music, or working on the recordings I have deadlines for.
But the grim reality is that we are basically responsible for doing our own promotion—unless we’re extremely famous. And even if we’re extremely famous, if you look at major artists like Yannick Nézet-Séguin or Gautier Capuçon, they’re constantly promoting on social media.
Now, in some cases, they’re not doing it themselves—they have someone who does it—but it’s a non-stop barrage because, essentially, you’re shouting a little bit, and you have to shout louder than somebody else.
Kathy, as you said, every day you see on social media every person saying, “My new recording’s coming out—I just played this concert,” and it’s kind of boring in some ways too. I mean, at some point, people stop caring, and the number of likes—it’s always going to be the same people: your family and your friends. So, you need to think about expanding your network in different ways.
I used to get ticked off at some of the mainline PR guys in New York 20 or 30 years ago, who would charge people and try to get them reviews in journals like Fanfare—which will review anything you send them. You could do it yourself. What a PR person really has to do is break you out of that loop—not just talk to the people already listening, but find new ways to connect you.
For example, I’m a big Korean drama fan, and I’m always looking for ways to get my recordings somehow into a drama as product placement. I mean, again, okay, they review you in Gramophone. Well, many recordings are reviewed in Gramophone—that’s preaching to the converted, and it’s a good place to start. But if you really want to reach a wide audience, we have to look outside the little echoing box that we live in.
I mean, I know you’re particularly aware of that, Kathy, because you’ve always been looking for innovative ways to convince people about the artists you love. It’s not easy, but the good news, again, is that there’s no longer a monopoly by a small group of labels. Even the management companies are not as important as they were pre-COVID. In my experience, you can build your own network. It’s a lot of work.
KG So, what do you think about all this talk of getting your work out there? Do you think that there’s still any kind of mandatory use for CDs in general, or do you think that somebody can accomplish this without the physical product?
MF I do know there are exceptions. I did a recording called Cinema with Renaud Capuçon. It sold a hundred thousand physical copies in France about five years ago. That’s quite extraordinary.
The artists like to have physical copies, but since most people are going to listen via a streaming service or the radio, it’s really not necessary. I mean, if you want them, you can print a hundred copies yourself—it’s not expensive to do.
You know, I only have about a hundred CDs in my house. I haven’t turned on my CD player in years.
KG Right. Well, exactly. So what do you think—this may be a little out of your purview—but what do you think about when artists play concerts? They want to have some kind of souvenir, something they can sign. Do you think we should start morphing into signing programs or signed photos? I mean, everything is going away from print, too.
So, what do you think we should start thinking about—or doing—if you have an idea about that? What do you do when you go to Japan, you go to Taiwan, and you see these lines of people around the block who want to meet the artist and get something? They get a picture, they get a selfie with the artist.
But what else can they get? What can they buy? What can the artist sell—or upsell—for themselves if they’re not going to have a physical CD?
MF It’s really interesting in Asia. I find that people buy the CDs—they even leave them sealed—just to have them signed, and then they listen via streaming.
Something we were experimenting with in South Korea, when I was working for the Seoul Philharmonic and some other organizations, was something like a Polaroid selfie. You could have the selfie taken with the artist, and then it would be printed at a table a couple of meters away, after which it could be signed. It was cumbersome—we hadn’t really worked it out.
Till Janczukowicz, who is the owner and founder of the Idagio streaming service, said that what people really want is contact with the artists—some kind of contact.
He and I have been talking for three or four years about how one best does this—whether it’s online interaction with the artist. For example, he’s talked to me about doing a class on recording production that would involve some of the artists I record. We would talk together, and people would be able to interact with us through the medium of the computer.
I did a recording in Hanover with Valentina Lisitsa, which was being live-streamed, and every time we had a break, she would run out and type answers to questions from her fans.
If you’re talking specifically about a physical souvenir, I think photographic selfies are the thing. The other thing you see on social media is that every musician who plays in an orchestra has that selfie with the famous soloist—the selfie with the conductor.
I played last summer in Festival Mosaic. Hélène Grimaud played the Schumann Piano Concerto. I think almost the entire woodwind section was lining up to take selfies with Hélène. That was their souvenir.
KG But they want something to sign; they want a thing. I’m thinking: bring a copy of your favorite recipe, or something else you can sell, sign, or give.
MF I always ask people who premiere my music to sign the score. I don’t know why, but it’s a habit. I kind of stopped doing it, but in the beginning—yeah, I did that. I wanted something physical.
KG Let’s pivot to your work as a composer. I’m really fascinated by that.
MF The thing about all of my work is it’s all connected. As you know, I have no formal training as a musician, or as a recording engineer, or as a recording producer. I grew up listening intently to music with my wonderful Russian grandfather, and we talked a lot. Then I was lucky—I was able to teach myself some instruments.
I fell into recording production very fortunately, since I apparently had some talent for it. About 14 years ago, I began to compose, and it was connected to a very personal event in my life—that was my wife’s cancer diagnosis—and it was just a way (it was her idea, actually) to have a creative outlet.
Now, as I’ve been composing for almost 15 years, I find that when I produce recordings, I look at scores in a completely different way.
And just to go back to recording production, I generally find recording producers are of two types: either they come out of the sort of techno-geeky side—they’re into gear, they know how to operate it, and they are adept in math and science; perhaps they’ve studied in schools like Detmold or Surrey in the UK—or they are musicians. They tend to have different approaches. I’m very lucky that, because I’m self-taught, I’ve done both sides of it.
I have to say, after doing recording production for almost 40-plus years, there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t learn something new about how to listen to music—and also how to help the artist give their best performance. That is the real job of the recording producer: to give the artist their idealized statement of the music they’re playing.
And now, as a composer, I hear the music in a different way. I see the music when I look at the score in a different way; I’m much more aware of compositional techniques that I was intuitively—and basically unconsciously—aware of before. But now I really see how it works. And that helps me when I have to talk to the musicians about why we’ve stopped, what we need to improve, and what we need to get.
So, for me, composing is different. I write very fast—probably not ideal. I never go back and revise—probably also foolish. The music I write is music that I want to hear. It’s bizarrely suited to things I like that nobody else is writing. Now, that doesn’t make it good. It doesn’t even make it particularly musical.
But what I also like, as a recording producer, is that when I produce recordings of living composers, I’m always intrigued by the way they either know—or don’t know—their music, and how they either want to micromanage the music or be surprised by what the musicians have to say.
I’ve learned that good musicians make ordinary composers like me sound good because they will always find more music in my music than I ever knew was there.
I just had a premiere in Barcelona of a short piece I wrote very quickly at the last minute, at the request of Russian cellist Sveta Trushka. She’s been practicing it, and she sent me this lovely story—a narrative that she created for the piece—and I just said, “That’s wonderful.”
I’m always curious what a musician will find in my music, just as I’m curious about what a musician will find in the music of a great composer like Mozart or Beethoven.
It’s always that dialogue that happens between the composer and the musician. It’s an ongoing hand-holding, and for me, it’s one of the most exciting things in all the arts—because it’s never a fixed thing.
KG So true. Music really does have a life. Michael, thank you so much. M
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