“It provided a blueprint for the ecosystem we swear by today”: How music production became accessible to all thanks to a handful of innovators

Atari ST - one of the key pieces of home production tech history.

PRODUCER WEEK 2025: It’s a fairly safe bet that one of the reasons you’re reading this is because you are involved in recording. For the majority of us, that probably means recording at home. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a professional carving a career from music, or a weekend hobbyist.

Today, the same tech is available to all of us. Even on the most meagre of budgets. But how did we get to this amazing point of musical democratisation?

It's taken a few decades to arrive where we are today, with one of the major turning points in recording history being the arrival of multi-track technology. It can be pinned down to the moment when Ampex developed the concept of an 8-track tape system.