The Pop Corporation

How much does it cost to put an album out? Let’s assume, for the sake of this article, that you’re focusing solely on streaming and that physical format production is a luxury most independent bands can’t afford in this cost of living crisis we’re all currently in. Okay, good.

Making an album probably seems incredibly cheap, if you’ve never really thought about the process at all. It’s all done on computers isn’t it? That’s a reductive take, and you know it.

Anyway, let us first buy a laptop. PC, Android or Mac, that’s costing you money. Then, there’s your instruments. A laptop can only do so much so, for your average rock band, that’s a drum kit, guitars, bass, acoustic, microphones to get the sound from your instrument into the computer and then, there’s a good chance if you’re doing it yourself, you might need splitters and mixing desks and all that jazz. This is all before you’ve played a note together. If you’re looking for some keys, then there’s a piano or keyboard on top of that, or at the least, a MIDI keyboard to plug straight into the laptop.

Of course, you can’t just play a bunch of stuff at a computer and it knows what to do automatically. If you’ve shelled out top dollar on a Mac, you’ll get GarageBand thrown in the cost. If you haven’t, you’re going to have to get a program like Ableton, FL Studio or whatever, and those things – if you can’t work out how to get a cracked copy – are eye-wateringly expensive.

Add to this, rehearsal space costs, petrol, food and drink, and the costs are mounting up. Then, if you’re a musician rather than a techie person, you may not have the first idea on how to use all this stuff, so you have pay someone to do it for you. Engineers aren’t free. If you’re not producing it yourself, producers aren’t free either. If you’re using a studio to save you having to buy all the compressors, reverb units and whatnot, then studio costs really start to sent the price up. If you’re trying to make a professional sounding thing, then someone’s going to have to master the whole project too. Again, another cost.

Then, if you’re putting it out yourself, then you’ll have to pay a distributor to get it on the streaming services. There are free options here, but Spotify and the like actively discourage musicians from doing this as you can’t submit your music to their editorial playlists unless you have a designated release date, which free distribution doesn’t offer an artist.

So, you’ve spent money on your instruments, bought time to rehearse, spent on recording and mastering and then, maybe you saved a bit of money for some promotion too, and you finally have your album on streaming services and Spotify have said that, if you don’t get 1,000 listens, then you don’t get paid. It’s the risk you take, right? You’re trying to put nice things into the world and, despite your pocket being considerably lighter and you’ve embarrassed yourself begging your mates to listen to your music, it’s all for the greater good and you try and convince yourself you’re not in it for the money anyway.

Then you sit in bed, silently awake, worrying about it all.

And so, to Spotify CEO Daniel Ek who is apparently worth $4.7billion at the moment, who reckons it doesn’t really cost anything to put music out these days, and the meagre amount they pay is good value. Less than a penny, per play, it’s worth remembering. He said: “With the cost of creating content being close to zero, people can share an incredible amount of content. This has sparked my curiosity about the concept of long shelf life versus short shelf life.”

“While much of what we see and hear quickly becomes obsolete, there are timeless ideas or even pieces of music that can remain relevant for decades or even centuries. We’re witnessing a resurgence of Stoicism, with many of Marcus Aurelius’s insights still resonating thousands of years later. This makes me wonder: what are the most unintuitive yet enduring ideas that aren’t frequently discussed today but might have a long shelf life? Also, what are we creating now that will still be valued and discussed hundreds or thousands of years from today?”

If you can get past the nauseating musings about Stoicism and that, we’ve got someone who is one of the most influential music moguls in the modern period, thinking that the cost of making music is ‘near zero’. You can, however, get around $4,000 if you get ONE MILLION plays. And we’ve written about this before, but the top-end of artists are given favourable rates and the whole system is almost entirely broken. And he just laid off 1,500 staff too, which may be good business strategy for Ek and his shareholders, but if you’ve noticed a drop in the quality of editorial stuff on the service, now you know why.

The whole thing is a mess.