Sarah Jones is a writer, editor, and content producer who tells the stories of the creative and technical forces that drive the music industry. She's served as editor-in-chief of Mix, EQ, and Electronic Musician magazines and is currently the live sound editor of Live Design magazine. She’s a longtime board member in the San Francisco chapter of The Recording Academy, where she develops event programming that cultivates the careers of Bay Area music makers.
The music industry isn’t immune to natural disasters. From wildfires and floods to earthquakes and tornadoes, recording studios are as vulnerable as homes and traditional businesses — and when the worst happens, the loss extends beyond four walls. Entire creative lifelines are at stake: unreleased masters, rare gear, archives, the ability to keep working at all. That reality has been…
When Dr. Andy Hildebrand invented Auto-Tune pitch correction technology 25 years ago, he helped to redefine the sound of modern music in ways that even he couldn’t have imagined. Auto-Tune has grown from a corrective device into a creative effect that has evolved with the decades — one that, for many, signals the sound of contemporary pop. The tool that…
In the classic Saturday Night Live sketch “More Cowbell,” über-producer Bruce Dickinson (played by Christopher Walken), in the studio with Blue Öyster Cult cutting “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” takes a time-out from his cowbell directives to reassure the band of his hitmaking superpowers: “I put my pants on just like the rest of you: one leg at a time. Except,…
When artist Amanda Palmer made headlines after raising more than $1 million on Kickstarter to promote her album Theater is Evil, crowdfunding moved into the forefront of the collective consciousness as musicians everywhere wondered how they could achieve the same level of success. Fans have certainly demonstrated their willingness to fund artists: On Kickstarter alone, more than one million people have…
Being a successful musician today means so much more than being a great artist; it requires mastering a broad range of skills ranging from songwriting to recording to public relations. Self-promotion doesn’t always come easy to musicians, but marketing is key to pushing your career to the next level. More than 125 San Francisco Bay Area music makers convened at…
Producer/songwriter Cliff Goldmacher was only half joking when he summed up today’s streaming music royalty landscape: “For lack of a better way to put it, it’s kind of the wild west out there right now.” Goldmacher, chatting onstage with Pandora Director of Artist Marketing Jason Feinberg, hosted the San Francisco Chapter’s “Maximizing Music With Pandora” event, held April 6 at…
