An interesting discussion at Velvet Rope today, around the idea that one of the major problems in the mainstream music industry today is a glut of artistic sense and a LACK of business sense. Many independent projects are bottom-line profitable because they have smaller budgets, smaller audiences, but less barriers to actually make a profit. Big projects with ballooning budgets lose piles of money because nobody’s willing to pull the plug on skyrocketing budgets.
Framed up the way we like to talk about things around here: your CD project that cost $5,000 to record and $5,000 to duplicate earns a profit of 100% as soon as you sell 2,000 units at your shows. Your project would then be significantly more profitable, on a percentage basis, than 97% of major label projects.