Filter frontman Richard Patrick got pretty candid with Columbus, Ohio’s 99.7 The Blitz radio station about the state in which artists are expected to make records nowadays – “Short Bus was written and recorded and we made the record for, like, three or four hundred thousand dollars. Now we make records for 20 grand, 40 grand.”
A stark contrast from when Filter‘s debut Short Bus was created in 1995, Richard Patrick attributes not only to streaming, but the music industry as a whole: “A lot of really great people are not being paid what they deserve – engineers. I’ve had to learn how to become an engineer.”
So, it’s an easy enough connection to make that Filter‘s upcoming record will feature Patrick as the band’s engineer. Because Patrick previously reported that he had been working on the follow-up to Filter‘s 2023 record, The Algorithm. And when talking to The Blitz, he made it clear that the process is incredibly different from what it used to be: “I’m recording myself in front of my computer, in my studio, and I have a big microphone and a bunch of preamps and stuff like that. And I sit there and record it, and I’m the only one there. There used to be like a guy behind the glass, someone running a tape machine. It was a big operation.”
And that change in environment is not just the case for Filter – it’s for every artist now, “Everyone has their own computer, a studio system with preamps and compressors and stuff like that, but they’re all in our bedrooms.” And while that can be good in some scenarios, as Patrick highlights that it wasn’t necessarily their choice and that they were “streamlined.”
“We’ve had to learn how to save money, be thrifty. That’s the difference,” Richard Patrick elaborated, “Streaming has taken a massive, massive toll on our industry.”
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