Cultural Production in and Beyond the Recording Studio

Conceptualizing curation in the age of abundance: The case of recorded music

“…Inexpensive computers, software and equipment have democratized the production of music by allowing recording, editing, mixing and mastering to be performed in home studios instead of capital-intensive recording studios (Watson, 2014). Digital technologies and online retail spaces have also allowed musicians to enter the world of marketing, fundraising and distribution for the first time (Hracs et al, 2016;Langley and Leyshon, 2017).…”

The "Resort" Studio: An Introduction to the History and Culture of the Residential Recording Studio

“…The brief overview of each of these case studies demonstrates the resort studio as a legitimate business. These three studios, and the many other resort studios that were founded at the time, make visible the set of "atypical" studios that Watson (2015) failed to specify. However, their number and contributions to popular music, in cohesion with Negus' (1992) inclusion of their features as amongst recording studio norms, indicates that "atypical" is an insufficient descriptor.…”

“…Though attention has been paid to studios such as Stax (see Bowman 1997) and the muchcelebrated Abbey Road (Cunningham 1998, Bastian 2003, the residential studio's presence in recording studio history -both as related to music production and as a type of studio -has been overlooked. As an example, Watson (2015) has published an insightful volume on cultural production "in and beyond the recording studio," and presents detailed accounts of rarely discussed aspects of studio work, including emotional labour and, as outlined, the strong influence of personnel's reputation on studio success, all topics that make an important contribution to the literature and provide foundation for issues addressed in this thesis. Watson makes it explicitly clear that he is concerned solely with the recording studio as a "relational space" in a specifically urban context, building on Gibson's (2005) work.…”

“…As I've emphasized, analyzing and understanding the residential studio means, in part, placing it in relation to the longer history of the recording studio. An overview of this history has been covered elsewhere (see Théberge 2003, Millard 2005, Schmidt Horning 2013, Watson 2015 and its reiteration is not required here. Rather, I locate the residential recording studio as existing in a historical continuum, highlighting that "varying industrial and technological changes that have given rise, over the course of several decades, to a number of different studio configurations" (Théberge 2012: 89).…”

“…During the 1970s and 1980s, Rockfield's services were "fully residential," which, for £1200 a day, included onsite accommodations, breakfast and lunch prepared at anytime, a three-course evening meal with waitstaff, daily guest room service and maintenance, an assistant engineer, and 24-hour studio access (Ward 2015 band's recording of "Bohemian Rhapsody" from the latter album stayed at number one on the UK charts for nine straight weeks and was the record that "set us in stone … it just took off" (Ward 2015). 23 As Watson (2015) highlighted client affiliation and a studio's previous successful projects, these two albums defined Rockfield to the rest of the recording studio sector and were the foundation upon which it could build. In its history since, Kingsley Ward estimated that Rockfield has generated more worldwide sales "than all the other residential studios in the UK put together" (Schultz 1999).…”