Music isn’t fundamentally a business. But musicians can depend on businesses to do what we do, for example instrument manufacturers supplying fresh guitar strings and drum heads. Keep this in mind as you read this quote from Dave Lane’s blog;
“if you build your business so that it depends on a single supplier’s product, that you can’t get anywhere else, you don’t actually have a business. Your business is effectively a non-voting subsidiary of your supplier. At the very least, you have a potentially catastrophic dependence.”
A lot of musicians currently depend on digital audio production tools like Ableton Live, Adobe Audition and Garageband, increasingly supplied as-a-service by corporations much more interested in maximising profit than ensuring affordability. So I strongly suggest following the example of @lorenzosmusic , and investing some time in exploring the audio production tools released as Free Code, under a license that prevents any one person or company from having total control over their development or terms of distribution. Here’s some I know about;
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Ardour - “Record, Edit, and Mixon Linux, macOS and Windows”
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Audacity - “… audio editing and recording app.”
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Hydrogen - drum machine
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Jack (JACK Audio Connection Kit) - “… a professional sound server API and pair of daemon implementations to provide real-time, low-latency connections for both audio and MIDI data between applications.”
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LMMS (Linux Multimedia System) - “Produce music with your computer
by creating melodies and beats, synthesizing and mixing sounds, arranging samples and much more.” -
MilkyTracker - a “multi-platform music application for creating .MOD and .XM module files.”
What am I missing?