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How Much Does it Cost to Produce a Recording?
An anonymous reader writes "How much does the average new album cost to produce? I have seen this cost estimated between $500,000 and $1,000,000, but some quick figuring does not support a cost this high. According to various sources (Ok, Slashdot stories...), somewhere around 27,000 albums are produced each year and 906.6 million albums are shipped. I would guess that the album retail (about $15 per album) is based on a 100% markup, so that these 906.6 million albums are sold at wholesale for about $7.50 apiece, which means that the revenue from wholesale sales is about $6.8 billion. This means that the actual production cost has to be less than $250,000 per album, otherwise the record industry is losing money. I have left out the cost of actually printing and copying the albums as I think that the average cost is probably less than $0.25 per copy."
with large ATA hard drives and digital interfaces for various applications to drive real-world mixers and soundboards becoming cheaper and cheaper, the actual cost of recording, in a real sense is very minimal. A whole setup can be had for $20,000.
Then there's studio time. And paying the engineers, artists, producer, and the entourages of all the above mentioned people. Plus food, limos, champagne, jimmy hats, mini hot dogs, whipped cream, broken instruments, bail, hush money, drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, and there's about $980,000.
So you can see how these things add up.
While your numbers may hold true for the average, it obviously takes less money for the likes of William Shatner or David Hasselhoff to produce an album than U2.
Man, I almost went blind reading that.
On the other hand,
if a chicken and half lays an egg and a half every day and a half, then how long does it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all of the seeds out of a dill pickle?
Studio Time: 50K
Well Known Producer: 250K
Other Expenses: 100K
Seeing your album on KaZaA the day of release: Priceless
MP3's - there are somethings in life that you don't need money to buy - for everything else there is the RIAA