The “first-mile/last-mile” problem of making music remotely

Five years ago, I wrote for Forbes about how technology was catching up to major shifts in songwriting. Writing teams were not only becoming larger and more international, but were also embracing more remote, on-the-go recording processes, often through spur-of-the-moment Voice Memos in hotel rooms or green rooms.

Today, the COVID-19 outbreak has forced thousands of artists, songwriters and producers to do 100% of their work from home — creating an environment for studying the extent to which technology is actually in a place to normalize virtual music-making for good.

Of course, remote musical collaboration is nothing new. Several groups, such as Superorganism and rap collective YBN, have been collaborating remotely from the outset. A wide range of cloud-based tools are available at artists’ disposal, most of which launched within the past five years — from mobile-app interfaces like Trackd and SoundStorming, to DAW-sharing platforms like Splice, Blend and Spotify-owned Soundtrap.

But many artists still prefer to meet and collaborate in person. The rise of songwriting camps over the past few years underscores the value that the music industry places on this kind of face-to-face communication, and on the magic that comes from hunkering down for hours in a recording studio.

Can that magic exist in the cloud? Regardless of the answer, songwriters and producers don’t have much of a choice but to work in the cloud if they want to stay busy in the coming weeks.

As Elias Leight reported for Rolling Stone, many songwriters are now hosting virtual co-writing sessions on apps like Zoom, Skype and FaceTime. All of the artists I spoke with for this piece are also using file-sharing platforms such as WeTransfer, Dropbox and Box to exchange drafts of songs, vocals and beats in progress.

One caveat I’ve only recently realized, though, is that few songwriters and producers do all of their creative work remotely.

Instead, a more common setup is that a songwriter or producer will do their first and/or last collaborative sessions of a project in person. It’s especially crucial in these opening and concluding moments to pick up on emotional and communicative nuances that might otherwise get lost online. Then, once all parties establish a sense of clarity, alignment and trust, they go remote for taking care of the rest of the busy work in the middle.

In other words, remote work can be a powerful tool for behind-the-scenes music creators — but once it takes over 100% of their workflow, many inefficiencies come into play that technology has yet to solve.

The first-mile/last-mile problem

Based on several interviews with songwriters and producers, I’ve found that remote work often introduces both a “first-mile” and “last-mile” problem into their creative processes.

The concept of first-mile/last-mile is popular in transportation and supply-chain logistics. It might feel strange to compare these somewhat dry worlds to a craft as magical as making music, but hear me out:

In transportation, both the “first mile” and “last mile” refer to the gap between a bus or train stop and a given person’s home or final destination. The inconvenience of that gap prevents many people from using public transit at all. (One potential solution is the growing sharing economy around cars, bikes and scooters.)

In logistics, the “last-mile problem” refers to how end-point deliveries (e.g. customized shipments of Amazon deliveries from their centralized warehouses to customers’ individual homes) usually comprise the most expensive part of the whole supply chain. Factors such as traffic congestion and package theft make delivery routes difficult to optimize. But the last mile is also the most important part of the whole equation, because it’s usually the only part that the end customer sees — such that messing up that final delivery has a direct impact on a company’s future sales.

First-mile/last-mile is a powerful lens for understanding the challenges many artists and behind-the-scenes creative workers are facing as they shift to 100% remote work. In short, going virtual has made their creative processes either more difficult to start (first mile), or more difficult to finish (last mile).

Music’s first mile: Connection, feedback and spontaneity

As a matter of technicality, the first mile of making music involves two collaborators meeting for the first time. In the current climate, this step may actually be easier than ever. As I recently wrote, career opportunities in the music industry have remained concentrated in major “music cities” (e.g. New York, Los Angeles, Nashville and Atlanta in the U.S.), even though talent is not. Now, geographic barriers to making that first connection are all but nonexistent, allowing songwriters and producers to juggle many projects at once.

“I might be working on one song with one person for up to eight hours at a time in the studio, whereas I’ve already worked on three or four tracks today,” Charles “Chizzy” Stephens III,  a songwriter and producer who has written songs for the likes of Jennifer Lopez and Justin Bieber, tells me over the phone from Miami, Florida (it was around 4pm ET at the time). “I’ve also been getting a lot of ideas from other producers, because everyone’s at home sending ideas back and forth.”

Yet, certain aspects of spending hours in the studio are actually more efficient, not less, than going remote. Exchanging feedback tends to be more instantaneous and intuitive face-to-face than over emails and Dropbox links. Back-and-forth file-sharing can feel especially cumbersome in the context of the major-label recording process, which takes more of a village than ever: According to Music Week, the top 30 hits in the UK in 2018 credited an average of 6.7 songwriters. In the words of Music Week editor Mark Sutherland, that’s “too many to fit in a cab home after the session.”

This might impact pop more than hip-hop and electronic genres. “With pop sessions, I’m often working with co-writers in a group setting, starting with some piano and guitar and building around that,” says Chizzy. “With hip-hop and R&B-leaning tracks, it doesn’t have to be as hands-on. You can just come in with a beat and start from there. That’s a bit easier for me to do at the moment.”

Virtual collaboration is especially disruptive for session musicians, even if their work is already in part remote. For instance, Jay Mumford — a drummer who performs as J-Zone in the group The Du-Rites with Pablo Martin, in soul singer Ben Pirani’s band and as a session drummer for the likes of Danger Mouse and Prince Paul — normally divvies up his work for the Du-Rites between in-person writing and jamming sessions for generating core creative ideas, and remote collaboration for more production-oriented work after the fact.

“Now that the work is exclusively remote, it feels like a lot of the spontaneity is gone, and everything’s calculated,” Mumford tells me. “Sometimes, the most polished, well-thought-out and well-executed idea is not the best one, and what you thought was a mistake is what actually gives the music life. Now, I’m trying to make sure every drum fill is perfect, every snare hit is consistent, every bass hits properly. Everything is so meticulously planned now, as opposed to the magic and energy that comes when you just turn on the mic and go.”

There are two main technological issues that remain in closing the gap on this first mile for performers. One is replicating the high-fidelity audio setup of a recording studio across multiple distributed users; another is removing the latency — the delay between one user speaking and the other user receiving the audio on their end — that accompanies even the best video-conferencing tools. (Zoom’s “recommendation” is 150 milliseconds of latency, which would already be frustrating for musicians to handle.)

Some apps are emerging that address at least part of these issues, such as Endlesss and JamKazam for real-time audio collaboration and Gramrphone for high-fidelity audio livestreaming. But they’re still early-stage and have a long way to go before fully replacing the in-person creative process (if that is even their goal).

Music’s last mile: mixing and mastering

Starting musical projects is one thing. Finishing them is a whole other ordeal — particularly in the mixing and mastering stages.

“If I’m working with a mixing or mastering engineer, it’s all about context, or else it’s irrelevant,” Aaron Triggs, who makes electronic music as Bleep Bloop, tells me. “We’re ideally hearing the same thing at the same time, in the exact same scenario. Many mastering engineers are also using tons of fancy hardware, and it’s not like you can recall a patch easily just by pulling up a file. You’d have to take pictures of all the knobs and stuff in your studio. Doing that work virtually is harder.”

Triggs was planning on sitting down in person with producer and engineer Daddy Kev (who handled mastering for Thundercat’s latest album It Is What It Is, and contributed to Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly) for an unreleased project that Triggs fully wrote, produced and recorded under the Bleep Bloop name.

“With this new project, it’s important to have it a bit more subtly mastered, so I want to be in the studio with the guy,” says Triggs. “Now it looks like that’s not a possibility, as I’m not going to be sitting with anyone in studios for weeks or even months now. I don’t want to put the project on hold completely, so what’s probably going to end up happening is that I won’t be able to work specifically with Kev. It might actually cost more money and take a lot longer, as it’s a 20-song project so there will be a bunch of back-and-forth communication.”

At large, many artists are hesitant to cover the last mile of their projects in the cloud. After all, as the world of supply-chain logistics tells us, messing up the last mile could mess up the end-user experience.

“It’s interesting to see everyone taking their creative process 90% of the way to the finish line, and then just sit around waiting for time to pass so they can wrap up their projects properly,” Justin Garza, founder of the Dream Adopters — a media company that manages several artists, songwriters and producers including Melanie Fontana, Gino Barletta and Soaky Siren — tells me. “A lot of artists, especially A-level artists, have a go-to engineer whom they trust to cut all their vocals, and who really understands their vocal dynamics and tonality. It’s going to be hard to finish projects without doing that collaborative process in person.”

The importance of self-sufficiency — both now and later

One imperfect but powerful way to solve the first- and last-mile problem of making music, which often relies on others, is to fill them in yourself.

In the current climate, every musician is arguably forced to be a “bedroom musician,” in the purest sense of stripped-down but comprehensive self-sufficiency. “A lot of my favorite drummers in the ‘60s were studio drummers — they would show up to the studio, use whatever drums were there, do a quick read of the chart and get paid scale playing music with people they’d never met before,” says Mumford. “They didn’t need to have any equipment, they just had a skill. But now, if you want to be fully functional and monetize what you’re doing as an instrumentalist, you have to be fully set up to record at home in a moment’s notice. You can’t just go to somebody else’s studio and rely on their chops.”

Mumford taught himself how to stitch together music videos and other kinds of content using iMovie. “That’s totally not my lane, but I had to learn it on the fly,” he says. “You have to be able to continue putting your art out there without gigs or sessions. It doesn’t have to be Hype Williams quality, but it has to be functional.”

One of Garza’s clients, Melanie Fontana — who has songwriting credits with the likes of Britney Spears, R3HAB and K-pop groups BTS and Girls Generation — has learned to produce and engineer her own vocals over the past few weeks, whereas she would otherwise rely on third-party collaborators for that work (including her husband Michel “Lindgren” Schulz, whom Garza also manages).

“If you have the ability and the time to do so, this is a great opportunity to self-reflect and hone in on the gaps in your skill set that you’d previously pushed to the wayside,” says Garza. “Then you can make a plan on how to implement that learning so that after this is all over, you’re just more effective in general in your creative process.”

Of course, artists can be self-sufficient and still lean on their surrounding community of peers for energy and support. In fact, we’re seeing this happen more than ever online, with the likes of Kenny Beats, Kiefer and Yung Skrrt cultivating audiences through live production sessions on Twitch.

“I’d like to find a way to create some community or platform for people to lean on each other,” says Garza. “There are a lot of people out there who have no idea how to start, let alone fill up their time right now. Hopefully we’ll see a lot more people in the industry who make themselves available to give advice and mentorship, and take others they believe in under their wing. As an artist, you might be able to push yourself further than you otherwise would have with the barrier of A&Rs and execs having schedules jammed with meetings. People will be so shocked at how many of us are craving that interaction right now.”  🌊