5 Ways To Think About Recording Costs
There’s a few ways to think about the money you spend on recording your music.
1. The monetary perspective. How can I record my music at a price that allows me to recoup my money in the next few years through streams and physical product?
2. The consumer perspective. What’s the minimum amount of money that I can spend to get my songs released, at a production level that will satisfy my audience?
Most artists spend most of their career thinking about recording the first two ways. But there’s a few more.
3. The career perspective. How do I make recorded music that will excite my audience enough that they’ll come to my show, or maybe even adopt my music as part of their identity?
4. The artistic perspective. How do I create recorded music that represents my artistic vision and identity, while continuing to explore new musical territory?
5. The legacy perspective. How do I make recorded music that fits into my overall creative arc as an artist, and leaves a body of work at the end of my career that feels like a cohesive narrative?
A few thoughts:
• All of the above are valid ways to approach recording music.
• Fans and markets will tell you they want you to focus on the first perspective, but they really want you to create music with the last perspective.
•It’s gotten increasingly hard to recoup money on your art if you stick only with the monetary perspective. Yet for some strange reason, it feels like more artists than ever are doubling down on this way of making music as the only viable metric.
• The older you get, the more you will wish you focused on no. 3 through 5 perspectives, but you will constantly feel the pressure of no. 1 and 2 perspectives throughout your entire career.
• The further down the perspective list you go, money becomes less and less of the driving metric, and the quality of work becomes the focus.
• If you stay in the first two perspectives without eventually including the last three, it’s highly unlikely you’ll ever make transcendent art.