I’ve always found the usual words for describing someone who makes electronic music a bit messy. Thought I might capture some thoughts about that. Ultimately none of this ought to matter, but also we do need to talk and write about things, so…
Words like “writer”, “composer” and of course “producer” come along all the time and they always feel like only part of the picture to me. When you’re sitting in front of a computer or whatever electronic kit, you’re more literally making stuff than any of those words suggests.
“Composer” and “producer” also each have negative connotations for some people. A composer might be pretentious, stuffy or whatever. A producer might be knocking out functional, soulless dreck. A slave to a different kind of machine to the one in front of them, man. Mixed up in there are expectations about only making certain kinds of music. Almost mutually exclusive, where composers do arty stuff, producers make beats?
And then there’s “musician”, which I’m sure etymologically just means someone who makes music, but the usual use is a performer, contrasted with a composer and/or producer. I’m not so dumb as to think you can’t use a word in more than one way, but those connotations of playing something are pretty strong for me. There’s not much performing involved when I make music.
So, something broader?
Of course “artist” is now like the default tag for who makes the music: any music-related database or app would default to this. But there are multiple cases where it’s not the first thing I’d reach for. There’s some mucky stuff about attitudes towards “art” in here, which I won’t unpack now!
I settled on talking about “music makers” when doing the IA for my site Ambient NZ, and I really like it as a very prosaic and inclusive way of talking about electronic music makers in particular. Since then I’ve used the term generally, as well as just music making for the activity, and it feels easy.
Thinking about different strands of what gets called “ambient”, for example, you might have someone strumming a guitar and fiddling with pedals, someone manipulating other sound sources with other more esoteric boxes, someone editing audio on a computer screen… and maybe you might think of them as musician, musician or producer (?) and the last one more definitely a producer? I dunno. But the super basic “music maker” is incontrovertible and free of baggage: are they making music? Yes, yes they are.