Posted by Jim Shady at 64.236.224.52 on October 10, 2003 at 07:18:13:
In Reply to: you're missing the point. posted by on October 09, 2003 at 14:06:39:
: -I don't get what you are getting at here. Are you saying that musicans NEED a seven figure costing recording studio to make music? No way. The white stripes latest album cost like $11,000 to make. And, that should point out how overpriced these studios that are "required" by the labels actually are. Those studios are just another arm of the same monster.
The White Stripes album is low-fi - when you're as stripped down a band as they are, it's not going to cost much to record them.
Do musicians NEED all that money to make music? No, of course not - if they're prepared to compromise their sound to keep costs down. But then you're compromising their artistic and creative freedom - and what artist wants that to happen? If a band want a certain sound, it'll cost money to achieve it.
Do you have any idea how much studio equipment costs? I can assure you, it's very expensive. It also goes out of date quite fast - and how much re-sale value does out-of-date equipment have? Not much at all. Add all that with the cost of running a studio, rent and paying the people who work there and it all starts mounting up. Studios have high overheads and need to make money, and the cost all gets passed along. And once the record is made, money has to be spent promoting it, making promo records, transporting the band around, etc etc. None of that is cheap.
Record companies pay for all of this, and to reiterate, this is all with NO GUARANTEE OF SUCCESS. If the band doesn't sell any records, the money's gone. It's a high-risk business. And for all the bands that make money, there are many, many more that don't. Like them or hate them, people like Eminem and Britney are funding projects by lesser known bands that won't sell a tenth as much.
I don't know why people keep going on about it all being an expensive rip-off. Most of the people who do that don't have the first idea about how a record label is run, and what the costs and risks actually are. Secondly, the constant shouting about the price a CD costs to make product versus the price it costs to buy doesn't have anything to do with anything. Who the hell knows what anything costs to make before it hits the shops? How much does a chair cost to make? A computer? A car? There's plenty of stuff going on behind the scenes that people aren't aware of - what makes the music industry any different?
Jim