The Money Shot.

Everyone in a band is aware of a simple economic: being in a band costs money. In 90% of cases, more than you make. Assuming a 5 piece band does a gig for £150, that’s £30 each. From that, subtract your fuel costs. What remains needs to cover new strings/cables/amp maintainance/drumheads/repairs/rehearsal costs until your next gig. By my reckoning that particular setup probably need at least one gig like that a month to break even, and that’s without ever buying new equipment. So you want to maximise the profit on your merchandise and minimise the cost of getting exposure.

Once we started on making this CD, we started to think about how we could make it pay for itself. Here’s how the economics stacked up:

We decided to go for a small run of CDs that we could duplicate ourselves, but to have the inlays printed. This cost a total of £175 for 300 inlays from Testa-Rossa duplication. 300 printable disks, inks and cases brought this to just shy of £300 for the lot. So the calculation was, if we made 300 disks, we could sell them at £7 each (not unreasonable for a CDR album) then we could net £2100 assuming we sold them all, and that represents a £1800 profit. So the next question becomes, what kit can you buy for £1800 to accomplish this? So I put together a shopping list of all the things that a band might not have that would enable them to do the recording. I’m assuming that at least one member of the band would have a serviceable computer to use, and that there are mic stands and cables that can be used. So here’s the shopping list, courtesy of Jigsaw Systems, that would enable a band to achieve this.

Steinberg Cubase 5 – Focusrite Saffire 40 – Focusrite Octopre LE with digital board – Audio Technica MB/DK5 drum kit mic set – 2 x Audio Technica AT2020 mics for overheads and vocals – Shure SM57 (not all bands have one!) – 4 pairs of ATHM30 headphones and Samson headphone amp – 1 pair of Yamaha HS50M powered monitors.

Including VAT, all of this comes to less than £1780.00

Its not identical kit to what we used, but it allows a very decent recording of up to 16 simultaneous mic inputs. Some of the equipment is better, some is more budget. But if its used wisely, you’ll be at least able to equal what we achieved and probably exceed those results. All you have to do is sell the CDs (and 300 disks is an easy target) and hey presto you have paid for all the equipment. Which means on your follow up, you get to keep all the profits! If you add the £1800 for equipment to the £300 for disk manufacturing you’re back the amount we originally allocated for doing a rush job in a studio earlier!