Do I Need A Record Deal?

 

You’ve calculated what it’s going to cost for recording studio time, mixing and mastering your song(s).
What studio you will be using, hopefully you’ve picked us :). You know if you’re going to hire a producer, buy beats online, use an up and coming producers, etc. Congrats! That’s part 1.

After you record your masterpiece how will you be selling it to your customer? There are a lot of avenues to do this. You can sell it on your website, iTunes, Amazon, CD Baby, etc. You have a plethora of options. In our example we’ll use iTunes since it dominates this space.

Let’s create a breakeven analysis. A break even analysis tells us how many songs and/or albums we’d need to sell to make our money back, our investment. We will use the numbers from our previous post.
We know that a 5 song recording project is going to cost us $625.

Of course this will vary a bit if you go off budget but it’s a pretty good estimate. Let’s say you decided to use iTunes as your means of distribution. iTunes albums range in price but let’s use the average. The average price a 5 song album sells for is $4.99 or $.99 a song. If you were to sell the album for $4.99 then you’d need to sell 126 albums to breakeven or, 632, $.99 Singles.

Single Price	$0.99
Album Price	$4.99
Breakeven	Albums	125.25
	Singles	631.31

I’ve over simplified this example so that you can understand how to effectively choose your recording services and means of distribution to maximize your investment. Choosing which services to use is a moving target and they need to be analyzed on a per album basis. Keep in mind that going with the cheapest is not always the right choice either. The better the quality the more you can demand in the market place. The lower the quality the less of an attraction you’ll have. If you put yourself in the iTunes pool you’re competing with industry giants which means you need to sound as good as they do.

Best of luck.