Money in the Music Business

paulbd writes: "Electronic Musician has a good article on the economics of selling music on CDs. Its a sobering read that gives some of the hard numbers that do a little to counter the sense of record companies being vultures. Recommended for anyone who seriously imagines making a living from selling music."

Comments

And why the hell does it COST so much?

[WhyteRabbyt]

A typical recording budget for an artist's first album is between $250,000 and $1 million.
You could build the artist their own recording studio for that, and minimise the production costs of their next album. Geez even 250 grand would be enough. Wanna guess why they don't do it that way?
But worse still, this presents the story as being awful hard on the record company. Bullshit. Lets rephrase the process...
"Yeah, you write this piece of software. We'll give you money to cover the costs of it now, and advertise and sell it for you. We call that an 'advance'.
But when we start to sell it, you'll pay us all that 'advance' back, out of your share of the profits (we call them 'royalties), and in addition to you repaying our outlay, we'll get at least three and a half times the profits you do.
If you don't cover the money you owe us, then we'll ask you to do another project, and the amount outstanding will have to come from the profits you make on -that- one. We'll also reduce your new advance, and the amount of advertising we do because you're obviously unprofitable."