Chapter 23. Setting Up the Garage

GarageBand is an extremely powerful, easy-to-use program that lets anyone create professional sounding musical recordings. But as you can imagine, not everybody was thrilled when Apple released it.

"They're putting too much power in the hands of amateurs," complained certain professional musicians . "This is like when Apple came out with desktop publishing. Everybody used all 22 fonts in every document, and every flyer and newsletter looked like a ransom note for the next two years ."

And sure enough, on the Web sites where people post their GarageBand compositions, you can find a lot of polished, professional sounding, handsomely processed dreck.

But Apple has a long history of taking elite creative tools, simplifying them, and making them available to the masses. Yes, iMovie lets amateurs make absolutely terrible filmsbut it has also opened the gates to talented filmmakers who otherwise would have lived in obscurity. One iMovie movie actually won a prize at Sundance in 2003.

In this regard, GarageBand's cultural effects may be even more profound. Until recently, the record companies were the gatekeepers to America's pop-music market-place, and therefore the dictators of musical taste to the masses. After all, the record companies had sole possession of the two things talented musicians needed to build an audience:

• Production facilities , like recording studios , equipment, and engineers , and

• Distribution channels namely, record stores.

As you're already aware, the Internet turned out to be a killer replacement, or at least companion, to the traditional distribution systems. A song, photo, or movie can become popular on the Internet without any help from a record company, publisher, or Hollywood studioin fact, it can be all over the world in a matter of days. So much for the iron grip the record companies once had on the distribution channels.

With GarageBand, the other shoe has now dropped. Suddenly, no- name singers and undiscovered players can produce recordings that sound like they were made at a $1,000-an- hour recording studio. No longer must great talent remain untapped, or recorded on a tape recorder with an accompaniment by the local church organist. In the American Idol era, new artists can grow from the grassrootsand inevitably will.