Here is something that may be of use. When someone sends you or hands you a contract, read it. If they hand you a contract and expect you to sign it on the spot either ask to look at it overnight or sit down and read it in the spot. Anyone who expects you to sign something without reading it should feel shady.
Read it with a pen in hand. You are allowed to change things in a contract. People often give you things as pdfs or paper with the implication that you shouldn’t make any changes. If you don’t understand something in the contract you may just want to cross it out.
It’s true that many contracts are take it or leave it deals, but you never know until you try. And you want to know where you stand. Also the back and forth leads to a lot of clarification. Always be very polite.
Get your own copy of the signed document.
All of this applies to employment offers, leases, work for hire, etc. IANAL
From what I read in the article, you need to also avoid signing anything that says you’ll sign something else later (why in the world is that kind of contract legal?).
Your question makes a mistaken assumption about contracts. Contracts are not "legal" or "illegal", they are "binding" or "non-binding". And a contract that stipulates that you will sign something else later is generally non-binding. The people who ask you to sign such contracts are counting on you not knowing that.
There are several criteria that a contract needs to meet in order to be binding. Interestingly, being written down and signed is not one of them. Verbal contracts can be binding. The reason for writing them down and signing them is to avoid he-said-she-said type arguments if there is a dispute.
One of the criteria for a legally binding contract is that there has to be an actual "meeting of the minds", i.e. that the two parties have to actually agree on what their obligations under the contract actually are. An obligation to sign some unspecified thing in the future does not meet that criterion because you don't know what you are agreeing to.
(For this reason, a ToS "contract" which allows one party to change the terms unilaterally cannot be binding. You have to be given the opportunity to reject the changes.)
But most people don't know these things, and so they allow themselves to be manipulated by charlatans who do.
Disclaimer: IANAL. But I've signed a lot of contracts, some of which I shouldn't have.
Contracts absolutely can be legal or illegal. Binding/unbinding contracts are a related but separate concept.
A legal contract is a contract whose terms do not violate the law or public policy and whose terms are enforceable. A binding contract is legal contract that has been signed by all parties involved. It is perfectly valid to question whether a contract is legal or illegal, regardless of whether that contract is binding.
"Legal", "enforceable", and "binding" are all more or less synonyms in this context. Yes, it's true that a "legal" contract is a thing, but it's really just a synonym for "enforceable", which is really just a synonym for "binding". None of these things mean the same thing as "legal" in the sense that it is, say, "not legal" to rob a bank. There is nothing illegal under contract law in signing a contract to rob a bank. Such a contract is not binding/enforceable/legal but there would be no legal repercussions under contract law if you signed such a contract. If you robbed the bank you'd be charged with bank robbery, and if you didn't rob the bank you could be charged with conspiracy. But under no circumstances could you be charged with a contract violation (which is always a civil matter anyway, not a criminal one).
> A binding contract is legal contract that has been signed by all parties involved.
That is just flat-out false. Verbal contracts can be (legally) binding and hence enforceable. It's not common because of the practical difficulties of ascertaining what the terms of a verbal contract actually are or were, but it's not unheard of.
IANAL, and apropos of nothing in particular, there is a fun English case Everet v Williams [1725] (also known as the "Highwayman's Case").
They were highwaymen who agreed to share the loot. A dispute arose between them, and Everet decided to petition the court. This turned out to be a Bad Idea.
> [Consequently] An order was issued for the arrest of Wreathock and White, Everet’s solicitors, on a charge of contempt of court for even bringing the case to the court’s attention at all. And for his part in the fiasco, barrister Jonathan Collins was ordered to pay all the costs himself—earning him a unique place in British legal history as the only barrister ordered to pay the costs of a failed case.
Both Everet and Williams were eventually tried and hanged.
> [The case] is frequently cited as an example of the legal principle ex dolo malo non oritur action—“no right of action can have its origin in fraud.” Or, in other words: You can’t expect the law to help when what you’re doing is illegal in the first place.
Wreathock, the solicitor, was convicted of robbery in 1735. He was sentenced to hang, but it was commuted to transportation to Australia.
An aside joke ... An Englishman goes to apply for a job at an Australian company.
Australian: Do you have a criminal record?
Englishman: I didn't know you still needed one.
I think you're way out of your league here if you're saying that there is nothing illegal under contract law to sign a contract to rob a bank. Not to mention that you've now gone from trying to be pedantic about the fact that there's no such thing as a legal contract, to now saying that it's actually just a synonym for binding contract. If all you cared about was the overall intention and meaning instead of trying to get into the nitty gritty, there'd have never been a point in you posting to begin with.
With that said, if you're under that impression then I'm afraid there's likely not much of a point in discussing this further with you and you're welcome to continue believing what you like.
> I think you're way out of your league here if you're saying that there is nothing illegal under contract law to sign a contract to rob a bank.
Could be. Like I said at the beginning, IANAL. But if you are any less out of your league than I am, it would be pretty easy for you to cite the specific provision of contract law that would make it illegal, and how it would be prosecuted. Would it be a criminal offense? Felony or misdemeanor? Or would it be a civil suit? Who would be the plaintiff? Under what provision of contract law would they sue? What would be the actual damages?
At worst, signing a contract to rob a bank might be evidence of a conspiracy [1] but conspiracy is not part of contract law. Merely signing such a contract in and of itself is not an illegal act. I could sign such a contract, for example, as part of an April Fools joke and that would be perfectly legal even if the contract that I signed were drawn up by a lawyer and was prima facie valid and enforceable.
This is really just bad man. It's why people shouldn't get legal advice from places like HN.
First, the vast majority of contract law is common law, not statutes. Second, you seem to think something being illegal means it's criminal or civil. No the contract itself is an illegal contract by its very nature. In fact any contract whose purpose is to acheive an illegal end is an illegal contract. This is not in any statute but rather a common law principle:
Please, I get people don't like my tone, I'm rude, people want to downvote rude people and that's fine... but for anyone reading this please do not get your legal advice from HN. It's really just a very misinformed and poor place to try to understand the law.
In this very thread we have someone saying you can unilaterally modify a contract just by striking sections out with a pen. That just doesn't fly even if you do manage to trick the other party into signing it. And now we have someone who tried to be all clever and pedantic about the difference between a legal contract and a binding contract (before completely walking back on that distinction) and thinks there's nothing illegal in contract law about a contract that requires someone to rob a bank.
Be very skeptical about what you read on this site on matters other than programming and technology. That's all I ask. Too many people pretend to be experts on matters of consequence, and it creates a great deal of noise. Downvote away.
No, you're pedantic. Not that that's much better, but the first step in addressing a problem is achieving clarity about what it actually is.
Go back to the original question I was responding to:
"why in the world is that kind of contract legal?"
The intent of that question is pretty clearly "why does the law not sanction people who draw up that kind of contract in the same way that it sanctions people who (say) rob banks or sell heroin or falsify business records?" And the answer is: because that kind of contract is not illegal in the same sense that robbing banks is illegal or selling heroin is illegal or falsifying business records is illegal. Yes, it is true that as a term of legal art there is such a thing as an "illegal contract" but the word "illegal" in that context has a very different meaning. There are no legal sanctions for drawing up or even signing an "illegal contract". They are simply unenforceable [1].
You are absolutely right that people should not take anything said on HN as legal advice. But by the same token nothing said on HN should be critiqued by the standards of legal advice, especially when the person you are critiquing has explicitly disclaimed being a lawyer. There is a reason that IANAL is a thing.
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[1] https://www.upcounsel.com/types-of-illegal-contracts and note that 1) this page appears on a site offering legal services, and 2) the link for the word "illegal" takes you to a page describing "unenforceable contracts".
Yes this is true, although most jurisdictions impose fairly low upper limits on the amount of consideration that a verbal contract can cover. As of 2012 the most common value was $500 or less (and probably is still the same level or close to it in most areas). Anything involving consideration valued at more than $500 USD was not binding unless written.
Furthermore, contracts can be implied. IANAL, and I can't quote the UK case, but IIRC correctly it boils to whether there was "an intent to create legal relationships". The case involved a lottery pool in which the pool won. There was one named winner, and he decided not to pay out the winnings to the other participants. The other participants sued to obtain their share of the payout, naturally. They won the case because although no verbal agreement was made, there was an implied legal contract.
I'm old enough to remember the first edition of this when it was published in 1993. This is actually not the original version, Albini expanded it at some point and added all the technical stuff about recording, microphones, DATs, etc.
>>>> Especially “Punchy” and “Warm.” Every time I hear those words, I want to throttle somebody.
I've seen this first-hand. I'm a bassist. When you ask any bassist about their sound, they all say that they want it to be "punchy." Every bass, amplifier, and speaker is described as "punchy." If not, it doesn't even make it to the market.
Protip: To overcome any problem with your sound, turn the volume up a bit. This is also a known trick in the studio, and the equipment showroom: Make a few arbitrary adjustments, then play it back again, but with the volume turned up.
Not to do with tonal quality, but in the ages of 4- and 8-track garage recording my music with semi-formed bands, the phrase I'm sure I was most guilty of using toward bassists was "drive it home". That always referred to a specific point in a song, though, and at least was something I could pick up a bass and demonstrate. It's that moment when the bass is supposed to deliver the satisfaction of answering and closing, resetting the rhythm and the melody at the same time, taking everything from noodly to clean again.
>Protip: To overcome any problem with your sound, turn the volume up a bit. This is also a known trick in the studio, and the equipment showroom: Make a few arbitrary adjustments, then play it back again, but with the volume turned up.
Protip: I’ve been studying audio engineering for over 20 years and have 2 full studio albums. I have no idea what you’re talking about. The Fletcher Munson curve is not a way to fix problems with your sound.
Punch is typically referring to a waveform with high dynamic range - the opposite of compressed. Warm usually indicates a sound with rolled off highs and boosted midrange.
Interestingly, in addition to being a bassist, I'm also an electronics freak. I've studied every amp schematic that I can lay my hands on, have built my own gear, and read a lot of online commentary on the subject.
In my observation, a fair generalization is that for every term describing tone quality, there are equal and opposite definitions and explanations.
The irony of this is that a lot of the sound engineering stuff isn't a thing anymore for recorded music - the producers won. If you mic properly and choose a space with the right acoustics you can achieve almost anything with walkthrough GUIs using a DAW and some plugins.
They are, but the engineering aspect is greatly diminished, which is why these days in music everybody is a producer and audio engineers are more likely to work events or film/tv.
Mics? Chances are (unless you're a vocalist) you can either DI straight into a plugin or use a VSTi to just midi program a sampled version of your instrument both performed and engineered to a higher standard than you can reach.
While I've certainly done everything in software, there are a lot of genres (such as metal) where micing is a part of the sound. If you listen to metalcore vs a lot of metal, you can hear it.
I would disagree on that, as a hobbyist metal guitarist myself, software like Neural DSP, Bogren etc has made such strides in amp modelling that you can get the same sounds in the box. There are a number of releases I've heard where you simply cannot tell the difference, arguably nor should you bother trying, they sound fantastic.
A lot of amp modeling software allows you to place the mic virtually in different positions because it affects the sound. I think when using a Kemper to profile an amp, it models the microphone + amplifier
I own a copy of bias fx, but I still feel that the nuances of mic positioning and acoustics can give an organic feel easily, much like how good musicians swing beats in an aesthetic way that beat swing plugins don't quite live up to in most cases.
Not everyone has a high opinion of bias fx in comparison to some other modelled amp and cab sims. So that sample size of 1 may not be representative of the current state of the art.
That was a good read, thanks. I'd like to know how the last 20 yrs have effected things and if musicians are still getting just as screwed. Sadly I'm guessing yes.
I have been making music for decades. Not professionally of course, but only for myself.
I think in the rush for fandom we forget that it is quite possible to be the best musician you know.
Music is one of those healing substances that will always work and doesn't require you to invest heavily or be addicted or sign a subscription. It will just heal you.
The fact that this has been industrialized and indeed weaponised in the Western world is a bit of a travesty - but we must never forget that our music schools produce 4 - 5 million new musicians a year.
This is why I say, the only rock and roll industry is the one where the guitars are being made and new instruments designed and fashioned - for us all.
The idols come and go. That old synthesizer will have a lot, lot longer use than the CD rack ..
I wonder how these calculations changed with the rise of production using computers, especially for electronic music, where even a studio is likely not a hard requirement anymore?
I am sure also a lot changed with the rise of various streaming platforms and services allowing to distribute your music to these easily.
Many (most?) new prominent acts get their start in their bedrooms with SoundCloud. It’s beautiful.
I don’t think there’s ever even a case where they _have_ to go through the industry ringer. They can just keep cleaning up using self promotion and Spotify royalties.
Of course if they want to tour, that changes the equation a bit.
I grew up in the Bay Area listening to “Live 105” the local Alt-Rock station. It doesn’t even exist anymore. There’s maybe one station on the dial that caters to a demographic younger then 40.
I’m not sure radio is still relevant for anyone under the age of 30.
Not knowing too much about sound engineering myself, I tried comparing it to software engineering. At the end of the day what matters is your output and learning along the way. It seems the author has a gripe with people calling themselves producers.
If someone said I can’t call myself a software engineer until I had interned at XYZ company and understood Kubernetes, Docker, Typescript, AWS, Rust, etc. I would say ok and?
I know there are thousands and thousands of producers and artists making content that isn’t of the highest quality, but at the end of the day they are creating. Setting an unreasonable bar of skill is not the way forward.
The date on the article is actually important here. Music recording is MUCH different then it is today, 20 years later.
The best you could do for a home recording was a (comparative to today) shitty 4 track cassette recorder. You really needed some training on the equipment to know what you're doing. The resources just wern't there otherwise.
The analogy for the worst cases here is more 'I've turned a computer on, so, Mr Torvalds, heres how a kernel is written'.
Of course there were a few brilliant producers. There mostly mediocre producers who just got the job done, that you'll never hear about. Only the outliers, the best and worst get remembered.
30 years later (I started listening to a lot of music as a teenager around that time, including Albini-engineered music, realizing that that is about 30 years ago makes me feel... old?)
I had one of those last week when I was watching "Back To The Future" and realised that in a current remake, Marty McFly would be going back in time to the Olden Days of 1993.
I do understand sound engineering. I think their gripe is people claiming they understand how to make something sound good with no actual knowledge of how to do it then making up words along the way. Imagine you have a manager tell you to make the site more “zazzy” with a straight face. Imagine all managers start doing this.
The music industry has just as big a headache with imposter syndrome, the Flynn factor, and the Peter principle, as any other industry.
The issue is that the music industry is extremely exploitative, while being undeniably competitive. You don't get coders going to the extremes that members do, for their art. (Not sure if that is a good or bad thing, personally.)
>producers and artists making content that isn’t of the highest quality, but at the end of the day they are creating. Setting an unreasonable bar of skill is not the way forward.
Its not skill. Its sell-ability. It doesn't matter if you threw lemons at a piezo and called it done, if someone is willing to pay to listen to it - because it interests them - then you've got a hit.
The ability to sell music is a very, very difficult thing to attain. Music is immediately free upon creation.
We, of course, have imposed a great deal of arbitrary limits on its production and reproduction and broadcast and distribution over the years - but the fact we still have musicians out there, mind-blowingly great ones in fact, who will never get discovered in their lifetimes is a clue: music is language.
It therefore cannot and should not, ever, be limited by government - or its adherents - in ways which prevent the use of this language.
If you're going to apply that argument you should apply it to everything - music, art, software, money, property of all kinds.
But you won't, because the argument always comes to down to "Stuff I want should be free because I want it. Stuff that profits me personally should have legal and moral protections unless I personally have the luxury of choosing otherwise."
That aside - it's skill too. Of a specific kind. Producers have - actually have always had - two jobs. One is the admin side of delivering the project on time and on budget - which is not as easy as it sounds when band members may be drunk, high, unreliable, on the verge of a personal or professional breakdown, or at war with each other.
The other is having the taste and instinct to hit the market just where it wants to be hit.
Taste and instinct are incredibly nebulous and hard to define, but music buyers know them when they hear them. They're the difference between a record that sounds polished and a record that somehow has a life of its own.
With respect to Albini, having an EE degree has absolutely no relevance to this. If anything it will get in the way, because EE degrees teach you nothing about taste and musicality.
Nor - unfortunately - does talent in the abstract. Some musicians are just too talented for the mainstream. In a saner culture we'd subsidise them - somehow - without relying on the middle-of-the-bell-curve markets to do something they're fundamentally unable to do.
>Some musicians are just too talented for the mainstream.
The mainstream is a limiting factor in all talent. Not just music. This is because: information wants to be free. It is the mainstream which sets those restrictions.
The issue is that producers have no bar at all for the role, and the role is not well defined, unlike software engineers that typically have a 4 year degree, 2 year degree, or at the very least a code camp, before being hired. Would you hire someone for software engineering who had no engineering training or experience just because they can talk lucidly and in detail about what software they like?
Maybe a better software analogy here would be to compare producers to product managers. Great PMs are truly gold, but the PM role’s technical requirements are nebulous, and there are plenty of PMs who don’t know how to write code, and don’t know how to craft a good product, and don’t know how to communicate with customers effectively, essentially having no skills required for the job, but able to talk convincingly to enough of the right people to get hired and keep their jobs.
> unlike software engineers that typically have a 4 year degree, 2 year degree...
they do NOW. Back when a lot of us started getting involved with this, most 'engineers' had physics, engineering, mathematics, and other various backgrounds because software engineering degrees were too freaking new.
In the near-future (10 5? years? possibly sooner?) kids are gonna graduate with specialized PM degrees having gone to highschool thinking about being "product manager" when they grow up. When I was in highscool i wanted to be a Webmaster! now a webmaster is 15 people between desiginers, PMs, backend, frontend, QA, testers, blah blah blha
It’s a good point that things have changed a bit, but in 1993 when this article was written you couldn’t get a web job based on code camps, neither really existed. There was no role called webmaster yet. Webmaster today is a team only if you’re managing a large site, but not for small sites, and it doesn’t require many specific skills for small sites. Like you said, most engineers had degrees of some sort. For the purposes of comparing to a producer job (which has existed in film, tv, radio, and music for ~100 years) engineering has always had higher skill & technical requirements.
Back when a lot of us started getting involved with this, most 'engineers' had physics, engineering, mathematics, and other various backgrounds because software engineering degrees were too freaking new
Or in some cases, humanities backgrounds (Medieval Lit, philosophy, etc).
Sorry, but creating and engineering are on two different axes IMHO. Engineering is about using math and science to achieve things, kind of "the way". Creating is about "the goal". You can create beautiful things by just trying random stuff...
For me, the vast majority of software is not engineering.
but I disagree that engineering is just execution. I disagree even harder that you can create something by throwing random stuff,, you may well find something cool like that but I think creation does require more of a clear intent than random throwing and finding as if by chance.
I wonder what would be a good Steve Albini type plugin to get one of those increasingly rare young bands to sound like they had just recorded Rid of Me or Surfer Rosa? ;)
Now do startups. But seriously, while I have not got to investment stage, I have been in shitty bands in the early 90s where I know the names of the people in the article, had partners in the model-acting-whatever game, written as a freelancer and lived with authors and publishing people, and then also worked on hopeful startup products for myself and others, and even sometimes help VCs choose decks from the slop pile. It's the exact same grind across all those industries.
Reality is, you are either money side, or talent side, and there is almost nothing in between, other than the "judas goat" roles of the A&R guy, writing course adjunct, model scout, VC associate, where you get a job bringing talent into the funnel.
If you thought your dev job was different, your recruiter is probably getting compensated with 20-30% of your first year's salary if you persist in the job for 6mos, and if you are in the contracting game without negotiation skills or leverage, the company you work for is paying anywhere from 20% to 100% premium to your agency where you do work, an they did their work.
Around the time of this article in my late teens or early 20s I was sitting beside a pool at the vast country estate of a friends very wealthy parents, and I asked him, "How do I get this?" He told me something along the lines of "the reason you don't make any money is because you want money for what it gets you, like freedom, approval, acknowledgement of your talent, status, appreciation, and maybe some nicer versions of what you need to live. You don't actually want money, you don't make it for its own sake, and you don't use it or manage it to make more of it, you use it for these other things." I responded, "Of course, why would I want to be a slave to making money? What an empty life. I don't want to be some douche bag bridge and tunnel tourist working at a bank." He said, "If you want this, you need to only want that. You don't get this from what money gets."
The lecture didn't land at all. I was always a bit of a punk ass. I went on to do some really interesting stuff, where decades later I make a passable living having done some interesting and even legendary things I get to dine out on the stories from, but while I don't have many regrets, I am conscious of the attitude in this article and how it plays out. If you want money, make money. if you want something else, own that. Thinking you're going to be wealthy from your talent and efforts is practically the definition of magical thinking. Money is made by managing it, which means getting some, leveraging and investing it and extracting value from the risk and growth.
There's nothing wrong with not being wealthy, I do it very well, but attributing our ignorance about money to injustice, as a way to protect our magical thinking about the untested value of our talent, is to be stuck in a kind of adolescence.
> That’s why few self-respecting engineers will allow themselves to be called “producers.”
btw, HN'ers, I'm preparing a new Substack post about "music movies you haven't seen" and one of the ones I saw when it came out was about a recording engineer! Imagine that. I think Tom Dowd is the only engineer anyone would make a movie about.
It's Tom Dowd and the Language of Music and now I can't find it anywhere. Can you?
I did end up getting a copy, but looks like you found it elsewhere. The copy I found though the person who uploaded it does not want it shared on YouTube or any other platform.
Anyway, thanks for bringing it up, it looks interesting!
This is about the same with starting any other business. The gross revenue sounds good, but everything costs money and everyone has their hand out to get paid. The business owner is dead last in getting paid.
A lot of people conflate "revenue" with "profit". They have a very rude awakening when they try to start a business.
Sure. I as a musician that practised for years to play the right note in the right way the right moment will truly appreciate it when the unique style I developed with my band over years of work and sweat will be cloned in mere seconds by a multi-national corporation and their AI. Or it could be a 13 year old teenager that has the AI create music in the style of someone else.
Not that I am against sampling and remixing, but I have yet to see that AI based cloning of music can truly become an artform with it's own merits like sampling has become — or whether it will destroy the filaments of reality to such a degree music will have to become something entirely different than it is now.
What I am sure of, is that those who have power today will find ways to hold that power tomorrow.
I am the authority of what counts as an artform of its own — to myself. I mean I also have a MA in arts, so I know about art forms, but I didn't attempt to represent an authority here. So I am sorry if you perceived I was acting as an "authority" when in fect I was speaking a out my very own perspective and nothing more.
And those who figure it out and still won't benefit, because bigger entites do what bigger entites always did when technological promises loomed at the horizon.
Just by virtue of how the human brain transducers auditory signals versus visual signals there is a big disparity in being able to automate music production. We fill in many gaps for vision but to a much smaller degree for music. There's a lot less room for AI to fudge the difference between human and generative model derived music.
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out as I'm sure AI will found some use in music that has broad application and influence. But it will take a lot longer than generating pictures
One of the things those recording engineers used to battle was a high noise floor in the signal. AI lowers that signal<>noise ratio (applying the analogy to producing music or "content").
The issue isn't the barrier of entry in terms of skill or technical expertise, it's malicious and greedy business practices. And tech is ripe with that in all new ways of its own. Institutionalized, codified psychopathy is on trial here.
That’s (the music industry) is their point. They wrote this well into a prominent career working in the industry. It’s not just some navel gazing about the impact, it’s served as a reality calibration for musicians seeking something on the spectrum of sustainable career to stardom for decades. The sobering reality that “success” in music is and has been mostly a vessel to concentrate wealth and direct culture at the whims of a few powerful people is definitely not limited to music, but it’s something musicians deserve to be aware of in the particulars of how it plays out.
Read it with a pen in hand. You are allowed to change things in a contract. People often give you things as pdfs or paper with the implication that you shouldn’t make any changes. If you don’t understand something in the contract you may just want to cross it out.
It’s true that many contracts are take it or leave it deals, but you never know until you try. And you want to know where you stand. Also the back and forth leads to a lot of clarification. Always be very polite.
Get your own copy of the signed document.
All of this applies to employment offers, leases, work for hire, etc. IANAL