As more live shows are recorded, technical credits become more important for careers…
Who engineered Dire Straits’ hugely successful, self-titled 1978 Dire Straits LP, and where was it recorded? That would be Rhett Davies, at London’s Basing St. Studios. It’s right there on the back of the album, or on any number of online sources. Now, who was the FOH mixer and system tech when that album became the biggest tour of the 1980s? Yeah, I thought so.
When you flip over an LP jacket or look inside a CD jewel case, you’re likely to find the names of those involved in the technical aspects of the music’s production. From producers to recording, mix, mastering and even in some cases assistant engineers, the list of credits has been reasonably consistent in its presence and its comprehensiveness over the last four decades. Even when physical media began to disappear and albums unraveled into single-song downloads, beginning about a dozen years ago, there was an initiative, backed by entities such as the Recording Academy, to include that same information in the metadata associated with each song.
The purpose of this kind of information goes well beyond the personal satisfaction of recognition that comes with a job well done; the Recording Academy relies on those kinds of sources to determine who gets nominated for Grammy Awards. Those credits also act as calling cards and résumés for an entire cohort of audio professionals. The ability to identify and track down someone who got “that” sound on a record is what leads to the next gig and the next one. It’s how careers are built.
Missing In Live Sound
Yet, live sound professionals don’t have that same informational infrastructure.
The Parnelli Awards are the premier recognition event for live-sound professionals, and they’re virtually as comprehensive as the Grammy Awards in terms of categories, recognizing not only the various audio roles of FOH, monitors and SR vendors but also including lighting, scenic design, video, staging, rigging, pyro and even transportation. But after the lights fade out on that annual celebration, and aside from the minimal recognition they get from other events, such as the TEC Awards’ acknowledgements of touring accomplishments, the ability to know who did what on the live side of the music business slides into a dark abyss.
It’s one of the ironies of music’s digital era: tons of information is out there, but finding it and connecting it in a meaningful way is often nearly impossible. However, that doesn’t diminish the benefit live-sound professionals would accrue if they had the same kind of dissemination of their credits that those on the studio side of music have enjoyed. There would be the same recognition of accomplishment, the same ability to identify someone whose talents would fit with another production, the same ability to connect for collaboration and other purposes.
It’s also appropriate, considering how the balance of economics between recorded and live music have changed in the last decade. Compare PricewaterhouseCoopers’ estimate of U.S. concert revenues of $9.29 billion for 2015 and their projection of just north of $11 billion by 2019, to the approximately $7 billion that the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) reported as the recorded music industry’s revenue for 2015. That was a slight increase over 2014’s $6.95 billion, but down from $14 billion in 2000, recorded-music’s high-watermark year, and a number that many suspect will barely budge in the next few years. Live music, on the other hand, is projected to continue to generate higher revenues in coming years. It’s clear that the names of those who are working in its engine rooms warrant recognition.
The Big Question
The problem is, how do you do it? Back when live albums were a substantial part of the sales mix for the music industry — think Frampton Comes Alive, Live at Leeds and Running On Empty — credits for the live-sound professionals had somewhere to be found. (Whether the label or the artists put them there is another matter.) But in an even greater irony, while live albums are few and far between these days, and those that do appear tend to be “events” like Ryan Adams’ pricey $90 Live At Carnegie Hall boxed set, more live recordings are being made and distributed than ever, often through fan sites (authorized and otherwise). That’s thanks to the ubiquity and simplicity of multitrack recording systems that can be bolted onto the FOH console.
And — more irony — what these post-performance distributions often mean is an FOH mixer being asked to remix the show he or she just mixed live in time to get it online before the bootleg versions hit the web. Whether the live mixer is paid for the additional work or not — and there is more than a little grumbling out there on this point — the fact is that once the show is set in the digital stone that is media, those who made it happen are at least as entitled as their studio-bound brethren to have their credits attached to it.
There are third-party websites, such as Discogs, that catalog recording credits, while wikis with that sort of information abound. However, their accuracy is often questionable, and they’re barely a step above crowd-sourced. Unlike the recording industry, the touring business doesn’t have a trade organization that could lobby for the creation of the kind of database that the Recording Academy encourages.
The (other) Money Side
This brings up a completely other set of issues: record producers traditionally participate in sales royalties of the records they work on as part of their compensation; mixers and re-mixers may also participate to varying extents. Good documentation of who worked on a recording is critical to those who worked in those roles getting paid. As more live shows join the ranks of recorded content, knowing who did what on them may make a difference in compensation for others in the future. Just because some team members are not eligible for compensation now doesn’t mean that they might not be later. That’s exactly the issue now being debated about that may allow musicians who play on records to participate in the same royalty structure that composers, artists and producers do now, just as their counterparts in Europe already do. Things change — when they do, those who have their paperwork in order, so to speak, will have an easier time getting their due.
There are many good reasons for the existence of a way to know who did what on a tour and the content that is derived from those shows. And it won’t be easy creating some kind of centralized, accurate repository for that information. Those things are clear, but so are the reasons for establishing some kind of information registry. We’re in the midst of the greatest era live music has ever experienced. At least we ought to be able to find out who flew the plane.
