Here I am on the eve of releasing my own 10 song record and I come across this blog from TW Walsh (drummer extraordinaire, producer, and Dave Bazan collaborator) who discusses the difficulities artists have in releasing their own music this day in age. He identifies with the kinds of frustrations I have with playing and creating music and finding ways to share it with people. It takes quite a bit of time, energy, and money to make a piece of music and if you think about all of those hours and dollars spent the next time you walk into a music shop (especially one of those used record stores where you see like 15 copies of that Hanson record no one wants anymore), its kind of overwhelming.
It's a sad reality and although I didnt quite spend the amount of money he estimates, I still made some financial sacrifices for the sake of this artistic expression. Here he lays down some facts about musicians releasing their own material:
"Even if you ignore the value of a great song(as I said before, priceless), the cost of producing an album is pretty high. A cheap studio in Seattle will cost you $300 per day. If you do a lot of pre-production you might be able to record and mix an album in 20 days. That's $6000. Unless someone in the band is an engineer, you need one of those too. Bare minimum of $100/day = $2000. You're up to $8000. Once it's mixed you need to have it mastered. $1000. Now you're up to $9000. If you're releasing it yourself, you need to pay a designer to do the artwork…a good deal would be $750. Even if you want to do a small run of cds(1000), that will cost you at least $1250. Say you want to do 2500 units, that'll be around $2000. Now we're up to $11,750. Then you have to figure out how to get it into stores, pay someone to promote it, etc…it just adds up and adds up. Now, some people like myself record a lot of their music at home, but it takes tens of thousands of dollars over long periods of time to accumulate the equipment and experience in order to be able to do that. In the end, I wouldn't recommend it if you are serious about making quality recordings and enjoying the process.
So there you have it. To produce a 10 song CD and press a couple thousand copies of it costs a minimum of $12,000…that ignores the intrinsic value of the material and any other costs associated with arranging and hiring musicians, etc. If you were an independent band in today's culture would this sound good to you knowing that you'd have to keep your day job in order to pay your rent, which would prohibit touring(the traditional way to promote your music), all the while understanding that most people who'd end up listening to this thing that you labored for months or years over would have gotten it for free on a filesharing service? Why bother???
I'm not bitter about this personally - although this has affected my life and my career…but I am worried about the future of music and what this means for the talented people to come. They won't be able to put all their energy into what they were meant to do(create great art), and that has ramifications for all of us."
 | Currently listening:
Jailbreak
By Thin Lizzy
Release date: 20 April, 1990 |
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