LANDR, the Ethics of Torrenting and my Humble Ego

So I just replied to someone on YouTube and it ended up become a nice little essay on software pirating, techniques I've used to get more exposure as a small musician and mastering services like LANDR that automatically master songs for a small fee, using an algorithm that analyses the audio and applies EQing, compression and limiting in ways that it thinks the song needs it. I'm not a fan of these services and the article will help understand why.
Even if you're not a musician or any kind of creator I feel like these observations can be applied across many different mediums and that you'll at the very least find it an interesting read.

I wrote a comment on a video by Mr. Bill, promoting one of these services and gave my thoughts, this guy responded with this.

"If you're in a garage band and recording at home this is a good way to put a little polish on your demo for free. Without time, money and training mastering is not an easy thing to do. I don't see any free mastering tutorials on your channel so chill out."



Me:

I don't feel like paid mastering services that use algorithms to automatically master tracks are a benefit to anyone as you really can just master tracks yourself and have them sounding better for free and with minimal learning, time and effort. Chances are most people who are a making music or recording in a garage have the tools to so already.
We just haven't got the technology to approach an auto-mastering programme that doesn't sound mediocre at this point in time, maybe we'll get there soon though, and I'll definitely keep updated with what LANDR and other auto mastering services come up with and how the tech develops because it is cool as fuck.

I would happily do free mastering tutorials, but the truth is I'm not good enough at it to teach people. I actually do have some producing videos on my proper channel (Skyframe Official) but if you'd watch them you'd see exactly why it's not something I do. I don't have the charisma or skill to do something like that, plus it takes a lot of work, and I'd rather just get high and make some beats than fiddlefuck around with screen recorders and editing software, not to mention countless audio issues because my interface sucks and re-recording videos over and over because it turns out it didn't record PC audio. I can resolve all these technical issues but it's just a pain in the arse that I don't want to deal with. Sure sometimes Ableton or some VST plugin will fuck up especially if I'm trying to move files around or something, but it's generally easier to deal with and less effort for me. I actually have a post on my Facebook page offering free mixing and mastering as a miserable attempt at promotion, and though I don't think a single fucker saw it, the offer is still there, because I'm not big enough to charge money and plus I like to get knowledge out there for free and help new and small producers out. I have no shame in admitting that most of my software is torrented (probably one of the reasons my software fucks up semi-regularly :P) because I know that eventually I will pay for these tools but I just can't afford it right now and don't want to limit my creativity with demos and shit.
You might argue that offering a free mastering service when I'm not a massive expert in it myself is hardly getting knowledge out there, and it's basically what LANDR is but free, but the free thing is a big point, because if I was good enough and big enough I would charge, but if it's free people have no reason not to try it out and hey, they might like it, I'll get better at it and maybe get my name out there.
It's also free because, like with my music, there's no point charging when I'm this small and haven't even paid for most of the tools used to create it. Now I do have ONE of my albums on iTunes and the other online stores so that might be a little hypocritical of me but I didn't put it on there expecting people to buy it, I was testing out this service called FreshTunes which is like TuneCore but totally free, it's really cool and should probably have more exposure, and this kind of relates to what I was saying before about the free services for exposure thing. Also getting albums on stores that aren't Bandcamp is another good way to get promotion. People are more likely to buy from those sites since they get more traffic and are more "official" for lack of a better word. I don't have any studies to prove that, it's just what I've seen, I could be totally wrong and I'd like to see what the official data says, but I'm too lazy to look it up right now.

So yeah, that was a massive tangent and I don't even remember what your original question was but hopefully I answered it.

so yeah, let me know what you think