> Sources have also informed MusicTech that Future will be closing Computer Music, Total Guitar, Guitar Techniques and Guitar Player magazines.
YouTube has some great players, but I’d often search for guitarists from Guitar Techniques that YouTube algorithms hadn’t played for me yet.
I actually enjoy reading ads (not to mention reviews and tutorials for various products) in music magazines. It's disappointing that companies seem to have switched to junky web ads instead.
One of the things I miss most from physical media is the sense of discovery it brought, we saw ads or unexpected articles related to the magazine thematic, products or services that you didn’t know existed, same with books, browsing the shelves of the bookstore you found something new that drew you attention on the record store flipping vinyls you saw some weird album art and decided to give it a listening. Now you get ads for things you already bought or the same 5 books everyone sees because they’re “trending”, you have infinite music at your fingertips and yet get the same 10 tracks suggested every time.
Here he's using Sylenth1 licensed to "Team A.I.R." ...a well-known VST piracy org: https://audiosex.pro/threads/team-air.41932/
Just goes to show, you might build the tool that makes the next club banger or viral social platform, but good luck making anyone, pros or hobbyists, pay for it.
The market for that is tiny compared to music but, the money made basically guaranteed given adoption rates. Even today I think there are too few contenders to pose a significant market risk to these companies.
From a consumer perspective hardware dongles are mega-problematic right now because of the USB C vs USB A debacle on new laptops, and also because many AVs now block USB devices by default and require ITS admin to unblock it.
From a distributor perspective, they require shipping physical product to customers which reduces margins and can take weeks, especially-so when you talk about shipping from overseas.
Some seem to work a little like what you say, UVIs for example decrypt libraries against the ilok, and R2R has UVIEMU for that, but clearly it's not sufficient to crack all ilok plugins that way, or Softube's wouldn't remain uncracked.
And since ilok doesn't require a dongle anymore - there are machine and cloud licensing options too, and developers can opt in or out to each of the 3 license holder systems...
I have a bit of sympathy though, since managing plugin licensing is a total pain. Licenses seem to break randomly, or after any OS security patch or DAW update/bug fix, and then your project no longer runs properly. Kind of the last thing you want if you are a practicing or performing musician.
If I were him I'd consider using the pirate versions for reliability/usability but paying for new licenses yearly in order to support the plugin developers.
Between 2005 - 2010, many studios also had "a lot of water" in their computers, so to speak. (Referring to Team H2O)
Incidents like these are unfortunately common among famous electronic music producers. Your comment reminded me of Steve Aoki being caught with a pirated copy of Sylenth1.[1] I recall hearing that he obtained a legitimate license for the software afterwards.
Lastly, I recall the Sylenth1 developer around 2012 - 2015 encouraging people on Twitter to purchase the software rather than pirate it. Not sure how they found tweets mentioning piracy of the plugin, but I do think the plugin is reasonably priced compared to other plugins. Moreover, the license is perpetual.
[1] https://torrentfreak.com/avicii-and-other-djs-produce-hits-u...
It's anecdotal but people around me are less inclined to install pirated stuff than 20+ years ago. The risk to install some malware and the consequences are higher than they were back then.
It was the fastest progression from idea to execution on any major decision in my life. It was one of the best decisions I ever made. I didn’t complete the program, but got what I needed for my own musicianship and production. Music never got beyond a hobby, but I learned a great deal there. Later, I was well-placed geographically to enter a career in tech.
I’ll miss these magazines, even though I’ve rarely bought physical copies in the last decade. I've got multiple boxes of issues going back many years because even as the software changed, the tips on mixing techniques were timeless. It’s the end of an era.
Then they let Google scrape everything for SEO.
They never should have followed online content, they should have led.
if we didn't have the rat race everyone could just contribute the best knowledge and content and free software to the world. but instead of fixing the rat race we focus on literally everything else to conform to it.
If a magazine article is too shallow, or above your head, or below your level, then you're stuck. But with the internet and basic searching skills, you can find any level of content, in writing, in video, with projects and how-to's, detailed explanations, teardowns, DIYs stuf, fundamental technical specs and protocols, and on and on.
I routinely find the stuff I want on the first page of search, solid, deep content. Do people simply not know how to search?
Most any topic has a wikipedia article on page 1, which is always a good gateway to learn an intro to something, and usually has links to much deeper content.
Some tests: "chess" returns all pretty good content. "electronic music" - all good stuff, from wikipedia, to subreddits on EDM and related, to encyc britannica, and one news story. "how to cook salmon" - again all really good stuff: first few are simple and correct recipes, then a few videos, some reddit topics. Not a single crappy link. "who is quincy jones" - wikipedia hit top, news that he died today (quite a good set of links, no crackpot sites), his website, his instagram, National Endowment of the Arts link, encyclopedia britannica link. "does quantum entanglement violate local realism?" All good. Even pop stuff like "does taylor swift or the beatles have more grammys" has all good, solid hits: wikipedia, grammy.com, reddit post, quora, forbes, NYT,BBC, popvortex with a list of all grammys. Every link answered the question, is not wikihow, and is not AI generated.
Yep, as I expected. My guess is you didn't actually try and just made a claim without evidence.
Give me some topics for which the "the vast majority of content and most certainly the most common content the major search engines serve up" is "half-assed Wikihow articles or one-size-fits-all OpenAI-hallucinated slop."
I found zero out of dozens of links on some widespread topic checks.
Good luck.
(The internet opened up the world for all of us living in the boonies- Amsterdam was a 2 hour train ride away. I barely knew Japan existed until I could pirate Gundam and Naruto from Kazaa).
Until some point: I wonder if the their style changed too much or I as a teenager changed too much?
Or those vibes carried on somewhere else?
I only really got into comics in the last year or so. I'm blown away by just how many different comics come out each week. They have really well done artwork, and usually contain minimal ads, at least compared to modern websites.
Granted, there's fewer pages per comic. But something tells me that the level of effort is as much or more than most print magazines, due to the artwork.
Sure, the sample/vst dvds are nice enough, but if the magazine cost $8, the way it should, I wouldn't have bought the dvds for $12 separately.