Not sure how much all of you are aware of the current climate here in Los Angeles regarding recording musicians. It's been a heated debate for the past several years. LA musicians (along with recordists, stages, and support personnel) have lost A LOT of work due to out-sourcing and globalization. While this may not be a bad thing for film studios and package-deal composers, its very sad for the "Sound of Hollywood." This is a very complex problem I can get into later, but the key problem facing the industry here is secondary market payments. These are the payments, like royalties, set up for when a film gets sold to another market besides the theater (DVD/BluRay, TV, etc). There are a handful of musicians that survive (very nicely) on these payments that were set up during a period of time when places like London, Bratislava, etc, couldn't provide options to recording a score - that and the advent of sample-replacement scores were also not available. Now that we have competing markets, the studios are looking to save money and not record union to avoid paying these sometimes rather large fees, not to say this is not right of them to do so, but as a business, they are looking to spend a little money as possible. This forces a lot of composers to not use union players, and thus, record outside of LA. I wanted to share this brief article highlighting the study that the AFM (American Federation of Musicians Union) group Listen-Up commissioned. It is a pretty good study report. We are all trying to adjust around this, figuring out ways to get the stages busy and musicans playing again. It's taken about 3 years, but we are slowly seeing positive movement to allow for new forms of revenue streams that come in. If you want to read the LA times brief article it's here: http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-who-gets-left-20141215-... If you want to join the discussion, or just follow all the rantings/ravings/statistics, please join the Hollywood Film, Television, and Interactive Scoring Community on facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/HollywoodFTIS/ If you get rejected (by accident) please just PM me and let me know to add you. Thanks for reading! -Sam
Composing : Los Angeles Recording Scene by Samuel Estes
Los Angeles Recording Scene
Other topics in Composing:
Check out Trending Discussions
Register / Log In
This is not just an "LA Problem" - it gets even worse outside of LA IMHO and not just for films. As you go to other cities, like here in Houston, the AFM also has a presence but from what I can tell, it shows up mainly in the classical ensembles like the symphony, opera, ballet, etc. and also with some bands - mostly in the event and wedding industries. Now there are two issues 'out here'. First if a filmmaker wants to say do a feature (which doesn't happen very often) and wants to score, they usually find out very quickly that live musicians are quite a bit more expensive than they have budgeted and so they pretty much go with an electronic score and the musicians lose out. Now that is not always the case, but in the area of 'shorts' which are significantly more common here, where there are generally no budgets (and these films generally are for competitions like 48 hour film project) or go to festivals, you can sometimes hear live performers on the soundtrack but in most of those cases, the performers are playing originally composed material for free. About 3 or 4 years ago, I was on a project to score a short film and the filmmaker wanted a be-bop jazz piece for the end titles. It is much easier to write lead sheets and get it performed live than to get a good sounding electronic version with reasonably good improvisation. So I went to Houston Community College and got one of the ensembles to play a composition of mine written for the film called "Shiffie" and they performed it within 2 or 3 seconds of the time required and gave me permission to use. But then again, they knew they were not getting paid and that the film would not generate revenue. It turned out, the film wasn't even released (which was a shame). BTW - here is the track they recorded: http://www.icompositions.com/music/song.php?sid=151255 And also here is a more recent performance of that track from last Sat night (the piano and guitar player on the video also were part of the original recording a few years earlier): http://youtu.be/WfOJ7vu3A-c Now here is the second issue which is more business and financial significant and reflects the same concerns you have: The bigger financial market for film composers here in Houston is the corporate and advertising commercial market and these customers often have budgets and want live musicians. I don't delve in these markets but I know what I consider the two top film composers in Houston (one of whom has multiple films he scored for currently showing on the main Lifetime channel). I am told by them that when they look for musicians to perform the scores in Houston, they end up trying to negotiate with the AFM and the prices are in their opinions not competitive and so they outsource to musicians and ensembles in Bulgaria. Sound familiar?