Studio Monitor: Nashville Studios See Light Skeds

This month, some 25,000 professionals in the pro audio and musical instrument manufacturing and retailing industries will convene in Nashville for the International Music Products Assn.'s (NAMM) Summer Session.

The three-day confab will take place July 23-25 at the Nashville Convention Center.

Factors such as peer-to-peer file sharing and CD burning, a sluggish economy and the unprecedented quality allowed by inexpensive digital recording equipment have had significant negative impact on the commercial recording industry.

Despite that, an abundance of recording hardware and software will be on display at NAMM. Just as computer-based digital audio workstation equipment has allowed ever-higher sonic quality to home recordists, stand-alone hard disk recorders manufactured by companies once known for convenient but limited cassette-based multitrack recorders likewise offer 24-bit, 96kHz resolution and high track counts as a matter of course.

With the means to make high-quality recordings available to virtually anyone, what does the future hold for the commercial recording business?

"There's certainly a lot more people, as everywhere, working in smaller studios or in their home to do larger and larger parts of their projects," says Jim Kaiser, director of technology at Nashville-based mastering and DVD authoring facility MasterMix. Kaiser is incoming chairman of the Nashville chapter of the Audio Engineering Society. He was elected at the chapter's June 29 meeting, held at the studios of Nashville Public Television.

"The large studios are still in existence," he continues. "Some of them have adjusted what they do to accommodate what people are doing. But it's safe to say that [the recording industry] isn't as healthy as it was through 1998, maybe even up to 2000."

Kaiser adds that there is no longer the once-predictable cycle of release schedules.

"Over the last year, there were not as many releases as there had been in previous years," he says. "That slows things down a bit everywhere."

As Kaiser notes, while Nashville certainly isn't the only market in which the commercial recording industry is struggling, the atmosphere of Music City's mid- and late-1990s boom has cooled considerably.

"I can't say it's getting a lot busier," says Janet Leese, studio manager of the Sound Kitchen, a seven-room facility in Franklin, Tenn.

In 2003, San Antonio-based conglomerate Weston Entertainment acquired a major stake in the Sound Kitchen (Studio Monitor, Billboard, Sept. 6, 2003). Other local studios have taken on partnerships, most notably Ocean Way, which Belmont University acquired in 2001.

"We've got so many rooms to fill every day," Leese adds. "Next week, we're slammed—every room is full—but this week is kind of quiet. Overall, it's about the same."

One significant reason for this, Leese says, is that "there's just no overdub business. All the producers have their [recording] rigs at home, and they do vocals [there]. So the fill-in stuff isn't there. We're getting tracking [sessions] and some mixing. That's what I miss—having some block bookings. That just doesn't happen anymore."