The advent of cheap, powerful personal computers utterly revolutionised music-making. Even as electronic music gear became more affordable on the secondhand market throughout the 1980s, the act of actually recording and releasing music still required inaccessibly expensive studio gear.
Sure, the likes of Tascam’s Portastudio allowed musicians to make rough, lo-fi recordings at home, but it’s been the advancement of software DAWs and plugins that has truly made music-making accessible to DIY musicians.
