Ever wanted to produce your own music? If you’re a beginner, it’s harder than you might think.
Between stolen tracks, convoluted mechanisms for collaboration and lesser known artists getting robbed of credit, the music industry faces barriers to efficiently and fairly produce music. One UT-led start-up called Producer.ly wants to change that.
Producer.ly is an online music editing software that allows multiple users to edit a song simultaneously while tracking which pieces of a track come from each composer. This speeds up the production process overall and ensures artists are given credit for the work they create.
The software aims to launch worldwide in March for a subscription price of less than $15 a month.
Rudy Sebastian, Producer.ly co-founder and radio-television-film senior, said collaborating to produce a song currently involves downloading expensive software to a computer, working on a track, exporting your work to another artist who then reedits and reexports the file. This cycle continues until a song is born.
David Pedraza, Producer.ly’s PR representative, said as musicians tend to focus on their art, they don’t always notice the faults in the technology they use.
“As musicians you don’t really think about it,” Pedraza said. “You just kind of accept technology as it is, because most musicians think more abstractly.”
Instead of using a flash drive, dropbox or email to constantly export track progress, Producer.ly has a software called the Live Digital Audio Workstation that lets multiple producers work on the same song simultaneously.
“We have the ability to host a live connection between two different computers,” Pedraza said. “You can work with anyone in the world in real-time and not have to worry about having to reedit tracks that have been emailed.”
This opens a world of possibilities for musicians, Sebastian said, one of which is speeding up the production process.
“You can make a high quality song with a couple of people in just a couple of hours or days,” Sebastian said.
In addition to the Live Digital Audio Workstation, Producer.ly also provides a network for artists to find each other. Users can invite friends that they’re already working with to edit a track or find the missing piece in their artistic puzzle.
“You can meet people within the software and get interacted … look for people that you’re missing, for example a guitarist or a pianist for something you created,” Sebastian said. “If you don’t know anyone, you can look for that person on the network.”
Pedraza said a major problem in the industry is artists, especially semi-professionals without much market power, not getting the credit they deserve for the music they create. He added that between emails being hacked, studio feuds and no way to tie tracks to IP addresses, lesser-known musicians often get lost.
Co-founder Joseph Escamilla said Producer.ly solves that problem.
“Embedded into our program is an automatic ping (technological connection) which will tie all collaborators to their projects … nobody will ever be left out of the picture and everybody will have proper credit,” Escamilla said.
Producer.ly will provide the music industry with the tools to create diverse works of art, Sebastian said.
“It’s basically helping those people so they can have the resources, but also (to) incentivize them to create art with their cultures and different backgrounds (to) come up with something beautiful and artistic.”
