Music production involves an insane amount of people performing various roles, whether it is songwriting or mastering. But a producer? A performer alone is not a producer and a mixing engineer is not a producer – they are just parts of the music production process. At the same time, a producer may also be an engineer or a composer, but what defines them as the producer is the presence of their influence or supervision on all the stages of creating a music record. That is someone who is supposed to turn an idea into a record, ideally a distribution-quality one if they want to be able to pay rent from what they do.
Let’s say, we have got a musician. That person has written a song: a two-minute-long piece with lyrics over four guitar chords. They recorded themself performing it in their room, did some audio post-production (e.g. EQing or “cleaning” from background noise), and published it to Soundcloud. This person was with the song from its foetus state (“Oh, these chords sound nice together!”) all the way until it became a finished product, ready for other people to consume (a track on Soundcloud). So, then again, is that certain someone a music producer or still just a musician? Or is it the question of self-definition?
It is easy to associate the term “music producer” with electronic DAW-based music. The live instrument-based music only comes into the conversation when we touch on professional studio production. But if we define music production as a process of creating a record (in most of cases now, an audio file rather than vinyl), then it implies that any recorded and edited music – of any quality – is a product of music production.