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

I came on my Turkey

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes I did.

Re:Radio Stations in bed with Record companies

[Pen1s Goat Guy]

I think that there are mandatory requirements for radio stations and what they must play set in deals with record companies for station sponsorship.

Have you ever noticed that when a band may be coming out with a new album, a radio station will have some older songs in rotation just to refresh your mind of a band that you just may have forgotten about? It's an actual marketing ploy to jog the memory of people due to the fact that the flood of commercialisation has created a short term memory in our minds.

So yeah, the sheets are pretty dirty.

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."