Kazaa

[CoMpUtaFrEek]

This company charges just £1.50 per CD (your own recording), and thats to a customer. Imagine how much it costs them? Less than £1 mate. The only difference between this and mainstream music production, is the mainstream will have some kind of design on the CD, but thats printed within seconds at the cost of less than 20p for the ink.

The link: http://web.ukonline.co.uk/just-music/recording.htm

 

[root]

Perhpas I should rephrase the statement.

It costs a lot more than £15 to record 1 CD.

When recording a CD (even a small band) requires...

Studio time, studio technitians time, equipment, accomodation if the session stretches for more than one day, tape and or CD media, Music technitians to master the recording, the equipment to make the recordnig, the equipment to master the recordnig, singers need to hire session players to provide backing music. and of course the studios use utilities that the artisits will inevitably pay for...

I've got some friends in a band, when they went to a stuido to record a track, they came out 1 day later with a 4 track EP. that cost then £600 to make, and for that they got one blue CD.

After that you have to consider the cost of distribution media.
(we'll go with £15 for 50, -does that price include Jewel cases?)
each CD costs 30p
(@£3) You'd hae to sell at least 260 CD's before the band even breaks even, any less and they are loosing.
The average professional artist goes to somethingother than the cheapest semi-professional studio that they can find and pays a lot more because they won't be mates with a technitian that works in the studio.
It costs a lot more than the 30p price of a D to release an album. record companies have to reclaim some revenue, the only thing I say is that £15 per unit is a little high.

 

[CoMpUtaFrEek]

I think we have our lines crossed, I was focusing simply on PRODUCTION of the CD, not including the recording which is a very important part indeed, now that you mention it. But would you agree that the manufacturing alone of the CD (blank CD, Ink, Machine to record onto CD) probably costs less than £1 ?

 

[root]

Yes, Making a CD costs basically bugger all.

 

[CoMpUtaFrEek]

But yeh, I agree with you that the recording studio, etc. is very expensive.

 

[Dynamix]

Yeah this is a intresting topic-I have done a little research and this is roughly wat it costs them:
Example costs of a UK single: - Recording - £3,500
- Video - £40,000 - £60,000
- Remixes - £5,000 - £10,000
- Merchandising - £9,000
- Video plugger - £2,000
- Radio plugger - £3,000 - £5,000
- Posters - £3,000
- Stickers - £1,500
- PR (press) - £2,000
- Promo copies/postage - £3,000
- Website - £10,000
- Manufacturing costs (50p per CD) - £20,000
- Songwriter's royalties - £11,000

Total - £113,500

Remember this may sound a little low but this is only for a single so say a album has 20 songs each costing them around £113,500
£113,500 X 20=£2,270000
And if a album retails at say £15
£2,270000 divided by £15= 151,333
So that means they would have to sell 151,333 albums to break even on the manufacturing costs, and i think they sell about 300,000 on average, plus radio and TV and all the other stuff they make a healthy prophet.

 

[Dynamix]

no comments the forums must have gone quiet
(OOPS double post)

 

[root]

they don't make videos for every song on a CD. usually they only make videos for the songs that are released a second time as a single.
well the single is released first so people buy it, then the album is released so people buy that as well.

 

[Dynamix]

Yeah thats right, i got these figures of The BBC's site

 

[CoMpUtaFrEek]

Thanks alot for that Nemesis! I definately agree. They double their money in most cases!