I remember listening —really listening— to a Debbie Gibson song, in the early nineties.

She was never an artist I cared about. I just assumed she was a “teenybopper queen.”

The song clearly had one -maybe two- musicians in the background, playing a sampler, while she sang. Maybe she played the sampler.

I realized it probably cost almost nothing to record that song.

She didn’t have a regular band, and probably threw one together, when she toured.

I suspect that many artists do the same.

A lot of music these days is produced by one or two people with a computer sitting in a room by themselves. I sometimes listen to the Music Introducing programs on BBC Radio, especially BBC Music Introducing in London [1]. The music is submitted to the BBC by the musicians themselves—hundreds of tracks a week, apparently—and the DJs choose the songs to air on the program. Many of the songs, which are in a variety of genres, are created in the artists’ homes—hence the genre “bedroom pop” [2], which has been around for a while but seems to have taken off since COVID.

I’m an older guy with musical tastes formed in the 1970s, but I find a lot of this new independent music stimulating, enjoyable, and very competently made. When there’s a song I particularly like, I’ve sometimes looked up the artist online, and often he or she has had only a few hundred plays on YouTube and a few dozen followers on Instagram. It must be really tough for young musicians trying to make a career out of music now.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p025tszp

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lo-fi_music

There are musicians for hire to play in studio and on the road. Very common practice.

Similarly is the Beach Boys where one brother never left the studio and wrote all of the music while the other guys learned to perform the tunes to take on the road.

Not quite the same, but in that world though