You’ve gotta spend money to make money and nowhere is this truer than in the music business, an industry that many will tell you no longer actually has any money. Of course, we know that can’t be true.
There’s still money to be made in the music industry and plenty of it being thrown around. It’s just that labels have become more conservative about just where that money is being thrown around.
Essentially, they’re doubling down on their big name acts. Ever wonder why movie studios can afford to put out 50 superhero films a year but only one or two films like Swiss Army Man?
That’s because although Swiss Army Man requires a smaller budget, it’s more of a risk. Studios are better off pumping wads of cash into a superhero movie that appeals to a broad audience if they want a return. And believe us, they want a return.
Record labels work in much the same way. They’ll put big money behind a Rihanna or a Beyonce and the profits made from just those two successes can bankroll countless smaller acts.
So how much does it cost to make a hit song for a big name artist? NPR have done the math and manufacturing a hit, from the actual writing down to the marketing, will set you back about US$1.07 million.
For their analysis, NPR used Rihanna’s 2011 single ‘Man Down’. Whilst the song came out in 2011, the singer’s label, Def Jam, had been forking out cash for it more than a year prior.
It all started with a writing camp, for which the label flies in the best pop songwriters in the country and puts them to work in a suite of lush LA recording studios for two weeks, paying them to brainstorm songs for a new album.
The camps are split between songwriters who have lyrics and melodies, but no music, and producers who have plenty of beats without any words or melodies to go with them. In the case of ‘Man Down’, a beat by Shama ‘Sham’ Joseph was put with words by songwriting duo the Thomas Brothers.
Timothy and Theron Thomas, better known as Rock City, wrote the words to ‘Man Down’ in about 12 minutes. It’s an expensive 12 minutes. According to NPR‘s estimate, that one Rihanna album cost the label about $18,000 per song.
Image via NPR
In the case of this particular single, Rock City nabbed $15,000 for their part in ‘Man Down’ and Sham took home $20,000. Add to that the cost of renting out those studios and the cost of a typical vocal producer, which is about $10,000 to $15,000 per song.
Then the song has to be mixed and mastered, which adds another $10,000 – $15,000 to the bill. Add all these figures up together and you come to a total of about $78,000 and this is before you’ve even begun marketing the single.
And that’s the expensive part. According to NPR, it costs about $1 million to properly market a single. Proper marketing being every possible avenue — radio, TV, YouTube, etc. — all coming together at once.
Of course it would be foolish to suggest every hit song is the result of a big-budget marketing campaign. There are outliers. Some songs are just destined to be hits, others explode out of nowhere (think ‘Gangnam Style‘).
But like a movie studio, major labels can’t afford to gamble on potential hits or organic momentum. They need to take the best song they possibly can from the biggest artist on their roster and turn it into a hit.
That takes money. This means everything from buying ads on television or putting up billboards, to buttering up radio industry types who have the power to get your song played over the airwaves, which are still king.
And of course, this doesn’t always work either. A label can spend millions on a single song and it doesn’t necessarily guarantee that it will be a hit. It’s a tough situation for the artist, in particular, since we all know they don’t get paid until the label do.
