Devion said:
And you can burn you own cds, like I said.(And suppose your with 3 or 4 people(band) 1500 quid aint THAT much)
Also you just have to sell 1500/15=100 cds to covering most expenses.
If you ask maybe 5 euro less people more people would buy >_>, thats the whole point.
1.) (And I stress this!) It does not take a week to make a CD.
2.) Who's going to buy our CD if we have the mp3's on our website? If no one does...we're out 1500 bucks.
3.) If we ask 5 bucks less we don't even get to break even on our hard work...we'd have spent 1500 to make back 1000.
Devion, how long do you think it takes to make a full album? Because it doesn't take a week. Hell, not even one song takes a week.
I know a band who made a 6 song CD that took almost 16 months (they took their sweet time, since they were getting a deal from the guy doing it for them). It cost them over 10,000 dollars even with the huge deal (including free mixing and mastering).
They afforded it by selling CDs, t-shirts, stickers and such.
Regardless making a quality album for a set of self-sufficient musicians in a group can take anywhere from half a year to multiple years.
This is another reason why record companies favor the docile solo artist--along comes some hot young girl, for example, who is easy to market. They teach her some basic singing (musicians take note that most female solo pop starlets do songs in A), put her in some hot pants, and the record industry's already got a ton of songs written by professional songwriters (there is a reason why Lindsay Lohan's song 'Rumors' sounds like you could hear it in perfect placement on Britney Spears' last album--written by the same people). Many times the music is already recorded, or is quickly recorded in a rough draft by a live group. This takes less then a week for an experienced professional band and studio crew for one song, and usually half a month for a full album's worth (maybe you've heard of people who want to be 'studio musicians' ? Well, these are them). They change the words accordingly to make sense if the 'artist' doesn't fit to them (an example being that wholesome Hilary Duff ain't gonna be singing about being up in the club, her image isn't right for it). Then they get the starlet in there, do the vocal work, and get her out. They then record the real high end multitrack version of the song and use that vocal track. For about a month they do this with each song, the grand total amount of time it takes for a new pop diva starlet to come out is a mere two months or so of recording time, which my your math above Axman, is $12,000 ($1500 per week x 8 weeks). For the millions upon millions of dollars they are going to get back, this is a small amount of money for a record company to throw around (and this is assuming they don't use their own studio or studio musicians...which means that theoretically they can do most of this part for free in many cases). They then put all the extra money into promotion and touring for the album...and rake in more than a thousand of times that much money for their trouble.
I still don't think being in a few people's mp3 playlists doesn't make a successful musician at all. In fact by definition playlists are sometimes full of UNsuccessful musicians--those one shot songs that you wouldn't be caught dead paying money for.
Either way...it's not cheap to make an album, or even one song, which at bare minimum time to get a song of professional quality, would take at least a week...
...so think of it like this. $1500 bucks a song, then. And that's cheap, and assuming everything goes perfect during the recording, too.
You don't go in there, play your part, and press a button and ding your CD pops out ready to go. You have to bust your ass for like four hours to get the right sound, then you have to set the levels (takes FOREVER), you have to play the perfect run on your part (could another four hours right there, for some guitarists), then everyone else in the band has to do the same thing. Then it gets cleaned up, decisions are made, changes are made, and based on how 'workable' the tracks you get down are...they may have to be thrown away and the whole process restarted from scratch. Of course that is AFTER the whole repeatedly trying hundreds of different effects loop combinations, microphone input alterations, and mixing changes...and of course it's horribly frustrating, and almost every band I've been in has had horrible fights during recordings.
A 5 minute song can take an eternity in there. Nothing ever goes right in a recording environment. Only the most dedicated people with the highest end equipment can really make a beautiful, professional recording.
So really it's not that simple, Devion.
