How Atlanta has influenced the music production game’s output
Zaytoven, MikeWillMadeIt, M16, and the whole 808 Mafia (Southside, Metro Boomin, Lex Luger,TM88) are the reasons to blame for a huge wave of new producers/beat makers pushing the limit on how fast you can make a beat. We’ve seen the videos of them chopping up a sample and within 10 minutes lay the drums, arrange, and almost pre-mix the track. Heck there are even videos of producers making an entire beat in 4 minutes! With all this becoming the norm do other producers have to also make a beat just as fast if not faster?
Kanye said a line many years ago that I think started this, “five beats a day for three summers.” That line has resonated for a lot us in the music production business as a requirement for the amount of daily output that we have to have to be considered productive. Its becoming a real thing. People really do wake up and go into the studio at 9am and won’t leave until they have made five beats five days out the week. However, the level of production has gotten insane. Lex Luger once told a journalist he makes on average 30 beats a day before he even thinks of emailing an artist. At what point does the quality of the beats that we make take a huge drop to compensate for the quantity?
On the flip side of this, I can’t even imagine the amount of beats an artist whose generating a huge interest gets on the daily let alone actually listen to every beat in those emails. I don’t need any chart to show you that the quality of music in hip hop has dropped dramatically due to everyone’s mindset that posting as much music as possible is going to make them successful in getting one person’s attention in hopes that they will buy the music later.
Though these guys are legends and have given us classics I think the point that we have missed is that they did perfect their craft to the point where those 5–30 beats were all bangers and a few were hit records. We forget that this is a craft and not just a business. However with people’s attention spans as of late, can you really blame us?
