A good investment?
In the midst of all this positivity, there’s been some mild controversy surrounding MWTM, the result of the eye-watering fee for its one-week seminars—currently 4000 euros. According to Le Guil and Levy-Lasne, however, the price is set to cover costs, with expenses including full board and lodging at La Fabrique and the fee for the presenter, and makes sense in the context of other outlays in the studio business.
“Investing that kind of money in a training is a lot of money, particularly in an industry that’s in crisis,” agrees Le Guil. “But the price has always seemed fair. First of all, because of seeing my dad invest huge amounts of money in his studio business, I have always been aware that substantial financial investments are an essential part of this industry. And this is an industry in which people are used to spending a lot of money on their tools, compared to the potential revenues that can be made, and also whether they have the money or not. That has always been surprising to me. I was talking to a musician recently who was buying a pair of compressors that are $10,000 each, and at the same time he did not have a place to live in!”
MWTM participants dining with Michael Brauer at La Fabrique.
“When we looked at it in 2010,” Levy-Lasne adds, “Maxime was an up-and-coming engineer with a lot of experience, but also still a lot to learn. He was patient zero, the prototype for the kind of person we wanted to attract, and we looked at what he was willing to spend, and reckoned that there would be another five or ten thousand people around the world who would be willing to do the same. It is a passion-driven business! Witnessing the participants, it is amazing to see how passionate they are, and also how nice and attentive they are towards each other. They are in a service business, and so it’s not about them. And when they’re all in the room together, they create a wonderful atmosphere, no matter what culture or country they are from. This sense of community is definitely one of the big aspects of the seminars and part of the reason why people keep coming back.”
Going online
Nevertheless, the relative exclusivity of the MWTM seminars was one of several reasons why Levy-Lasne and Le Guil decided to expand their online presence. Other reasons relate to their desire to create a forum for the community experience that is at the heart of MWTM, and also, the online videos serve as a repository of the techniques and know-how of the masters, a lot of which is built on generations of experience, and in danger of getting lost.
Levy-Lasne explains, “We were quite late with our online venture. We started work on the online version in 2014, to have it ready by 2015. We continue to do 12 seminars a year at La Fabrique, but we are aware that attending a seminar involves a substantial investment of time and money, and people have to travel, so it’s not possible for everyone to come to the seminars. One way of addressing this issue is that we have also started to offer one-day seminars, in New York, Los Angeles, London and Paris—so far we’ve done 15, with people like Chris Lord-Alge, Paul Epworth, Andrew Scheps, Tony Maserati, Tchad Blake, and so on.”
“But in addition to that, we wanted to use everything online that we had learned from running four or five years of weeklong seminars. From talking to the seminar participants we were aware of what’s most beneficial to them. So we have webinars, and videos that show the masters at work, videos of professionals talking about the business side of their work, videos of professionals talking to each other, options for people to upload their own sessions and get feedback, and so on. We offer interesting, high-quality content, and if we had not had the experience of the seminars, we would not have known how to do that.”
High-quality content
The high quality of the content on the MWTM web site is immediately obvious to anyone even having a glance at them, but with the Internet awash with free or cheap tutorial videos, courses and blogs, is the organisation not just carrying water to the sea?
“It’s important to realise that what we are offering online is quite different from everything else that is out there,” responds Levy-Lasne. “We could have gone for a business model with us providing lots of free content and have corporate sponsorship and advertising to fund this, but instead we went for our seminar model, with really high-quality but paid-for content. This is part of our brand image, and also, we did not want to fall in the trap of presenters praising a certain compressor or plugin, and you’re not sure whether it’s to do with corporate sponsorship. We want all our online content to be free of that, so you know it’s all about the presenter’s opinion and approach. Of course, building a big web site with professionally-made videos and other features requires a considerable budget, so we stuck on a price tag that we feel is fair compared to everything that is online.”
The added value the Mix With The Masters web site offers over other online content clearly is recognized by many people, and this has led to the company expanding very quickly. There is again an air of slight amazement and wonder on the part of Levy-Lasne and Le Guil about the fact that they find themselves in the position they are in. A few years ago Le Guil shared his concern with me that MWTM should, “not grow too fast and lose the original spirit,” and clearly the duo is at pains to make sure that this is not the case.
Levy-Lasne: “Because of the online platform, running MWTM became far too much work for Maxime and I, so we now employ nine full-time staff, including three full-time video editors who produce a lot of high-quality video content. We release an hour to an hour and a half of video content every two weeks, and it has to be perfect in terms of content, the way it is presented and the visual quality. Because we have so many online customers we also have to deal with customer services, marketing, and so on. As for the future, we want to offer more online services, including consulting, more webinars, and more tools for sharing knowledge and for interaction. In general, we want to foster the community spirit, which means that being a member is more than just consuming things.”
'Do you think it will take off?" Victor tests the MWTM dirigible at AES New York.Photo: Tchad Blake
Other new initiatives at MWTM include the inclusion of younger professionals who work in today’s pop, urban and EDM genres, and so mixers and producers like Leslie Brathwaite (Cardi B, Pharrell Williams) Emile Haynie (Florence + the Machine, Lana Del Rey), Josh Gudwin (Dua Lipa, Justin Bieber), and Marcella Araica (Pink, Justin Timberlake) are now on MWTM’s roster. Le Guil, meanwhile, returns to the subject of MWTM’s underlying ethos. “It really has never been about us, but always about a passion for the studio, for these incredible people behind the glass, doing a fantastic job, and who have a lot to share. We fell in love with their stories, like all the seminar participants, the web site members. Even as we are now run like a proper business, it still is what still drives us today.”