Tag: NC Surround Around

There’s a 63-acre compound on Borland Road, out in the rolling Orange County countryside near Hillsborough. On it is situated a log cabin, a barn and several other outbuildings stuffed with the kind of gear that only true believers would collect: a Neve 88R mixing desk originally commissioned by New York’s Electric Lady Studios; a live reverb chamber; several isolation booths; and, aurally immersive Dolby Atmos mixing capabilities. This particular compound goes by the name of Sonark Media, and it’s a thoroughly modern complex offering recording, performance and streaming capabilities.

Sonark is the brainchild of Steven Raets, a Belgian-born polymath. Up until 2012, Raets had been working for the “big three” investment firms: Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase. That all changed the following year, when he retired.

“Then basically the question was, what was gonna be the rest of my life?” Raets says. “I’ve always had a big passion for music. I’ve played in all kinds of bands since I was 12 — party bands, original bands, when I lived in Belgium and London. I’ve always been involved in music; that’s always been my destiny. I just happened to be really good at mathematics and statistics, so I ended up in a trading role, but I knew I was going to go back to music. That moment happened in 2013.”

Raets built a home studio in the basement of his Chapel Hill home — he’s married to a UNC professor — and started producing records. Once the kids were out of the house, the couple decided to scale down. They bought a farm not far from where they lived and began fixing up the old log cabin on the property. But Raets wanted to move up, literally, from the basement.

“I said to my wife, ‘You know, I want to keep doing music,’” Raets says. “‘So, if we’re moving from this house, then you have to allow me to build a proper studio.’ And she said, ‘Yeah.’”

Raets’ idea of what constitutes a “proper” studio might differ a little from most industry entrepreneurs. For one thing, he and his partners run three full recording studios on the Sonark property: Studio A, with a huge live room, high ceiling and three isolation booths; the smaller Studio B; and a renovated barn dedicated to rehearsals, live performances and streaming. The rooms sound amazing, and the gear is impeccable. If this was all the Sonark gang did, it would be more than enough. But these people are true believers.

“I think we’re uniquely set up to help the music industry rethink how music should be made, distributed, enjoyed and monetized,” Raets says, “and that is basically what keeps us awake every day. How can we help our musicians make more money in this world where music has become worthless? That’s our mission at Sonark.”

The fact that this question is even being articulated is refreshing. Without getting too technical about it, many of the fundamental revenue streams for musicians have dried up over the last few decades. Unless you’ve established a national touring base, it’s tough to make enough money at each gig to put gas in the van to get to the next town. Vinyl records have made a comeback, but they’re considered merchandise, to be sold along with band T-shirts, posters and hoodies — and many clubs take a percentage of this money. Merch is welcome supplemental income, but it will hardly keep body and soul together. That leaves digital streaming.

In the past year and a half, Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek has made over $345 million, with his top executives coming in a close second, leaving megastars like Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift in the dust. This is because a generous calculation of Spotify’s payout is about $0.003 per stream, and that’s allowing for the artist having complete control over their intellectual property, which is seldom the case. So even Swift — the most streamed artist on the platform — has yet to earn the kind of dough Ek has made.

Raets and his colleagues have spent a lot of time on the issue of putting money into musicians’ pockets, and they’ve come up with PIE TV, a subscription platform that allows users to stream Sonark-produced live performances on demand.

“It is inevitable that, as our technology advances and becomes more sophisticated, and as the bandwidth of our wireless devices increases, music will be viewed as well as listened to,” Raets says. “For years, I’ve been thinking of how to do that in a way that could be packaged and make sense for both the artists and those who help produce it. We finally came up with this idea where we would start producing intimate shows with bands but produce them as if you are in the PNC Arena, except with maybe 150 people there. We give the band a very controlled environment with enormous amounts of production value.”

Sonark performances are shot on at least a half-dozen high-definition digital cameras, while the audio is sent to Studio A for mixing. Edited audio and video are then synced and sent out for broadcast on the PIE TV app. Artists are paid guarantees for their performance, and they own part of the intellectual property of the broadcast and so are entitled to an ongoing royalty share from future streaming.

Compare this to the hugely popular YouTube live performances where none of the revenue generated from those videos goes to the artist. Admittedly, this is no different than live television performances in days of yore. “If you were going to play Jimmy Kimmel or Saturday Night Live or Austin City Limits, you would have to do it for cost,” Raets says. “You get very little out of it as a band except for a huge platform and promotional value. But the monetization goes entirely to the network.”

PBS NC has taken note, broadcasting a season of Sonark Sessions: Live from the Barn featuring 10 North Carolina-based artists. As far as Raets is concerned, there’s no reason to stop there. “North Carolina is an incredibly fertile ground for talent,” he says. “But we really don’t have an industry. There’s not a lot of jobs around. I want to create awareness of the fact that the music industry is not a hobby; it’s a valid center of revenue. You have only to look at Austin, Texas, to see how that worked out for them. Twenty-five years ago, it didn’t exist. Now, the music industry contributes hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenues to the city. My dream is to do something similar to that for North Carolina. There’s a lot of potential here and you can feel it bubbling everywhere.”