Hey, I'm Brian Hyatt, and this is Rolling Stone Music Now.

I'm in the studio with Amy X-Wang, our music business reporter for Rolling Stone,

and Amy wrote a great article recently about sort of the history and impact of garage band on music.

Garage Band being of course the Apple program that started on computers and then went to iOS so you can have it on your

phone, you can have it on your iPad, and it's democratized music making in a really impactful

way for better and for worse. But before we get to that and

hi Amy welcome to show. Hey Brian thanks for having me. Absolutely and

before we get to that I thought we'd back up and talk a little bit about the history of home recording because it obviously started well before garage band.

I think one of the first people to actually record at home was a Les Paul, the jazz artist and guitarist who paid

$10,000 in the 40s for one of the earliest eight-track reel-to-reels and he

pioneered a lot of overdubs, basically overdubbing himself.

He was one of the first people to do that and I think it's intriguing to compare a $10,000

giant machine in your house to the ability to do that on your phone anywhere.

That says a lot about where we've come.

And then so it continued as something for a tiny minority of well-off musicians because there was no real home

recording equipment not really someone like Pete Townsend as early as 64 or so had

multi-track tape machines in his house and you can hear on the album

Scoop and its sequels where he released the demos he was making for the

who and he was again like a kind of a pioneer of every band and then you know first it started as

people in bands making demos that were then sort of brought to life by other

musicians and now there is the distinction between demos and a

release recording has been demolished because basically you know you can make

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