The cost of piracy

The cost of piracy revealed...

From Lilly Allen to Elton John, Peter Mandleson to my own grandmother, everyone is talking about piracy. Plenty of people have plenty of ideas about how to combat it, but nothing much ever seems to change. In fact, only yesterday were goverment punishments for repeat offenders watered down. One theory doing the rounds is that making piracy taboo and 'un-cool' is the best way forward. (Techno stalwart Donnacha Costello recently tweeted in a conversation with Buzzing Fly boss Ben Watt that "people are less likely to cheat if you simply ask them to read the ten commandments before you put temptation in their way."

To that end, we spoke to label boss, DJ and producer Timo Garcia about the time and costs involved in putting out a record (as he did earlier this year with his multi-faceted house and tech offering 'Wonderlust Bug') and hope the resulting revelations may nibble at your conscious the next time you're tempted to follow that rapidshare link...

How many man hours did you spend writing and recording the album?

Generally each song takes about a week to write from start to finish although the last song on my 'Wonderlust Bug' album the morning after took months. Well actually a year in total but a few months of writing, recording the vocals, and engineering to get it to sound just right.

How much does it cost to then master, and how long does that take?

It takes about a week to get the mastered professionally and costs anywhere from £250 and £600 for the full album to be done and pressed onto Red Book CD ready for mass manufacturing.

How much to the reproduce, market, distribute, advertise, sell?

There are so many costs involved in putting an album out and it really depends on how much you have got and are willing to spend when it comes to advertising and marketing. We didn't have a massive budget being an independent label and depending on what kind of CD packaging you go for prices can vary massively from around £400 per 1000 for the cheapest plastic jewel cased album to £1200 for 1000 for the more stylish digipack designs like the one we used for 'Wonderlust Bug' and more for double or triple packs with inlay booklets etc. Then comes the artwork design which can cost anywhere from £300 up to £1000 or more depending on who you use and how involved you get in the design. I spent several months working closely with an amazing graphic designer called Ed Coward on the design of my album because i had a good idea of how I wanted it to look and we had fun bouncing ideas off each other and getting it perfect! We spent several hundred pounds printing up posters and another few hundred getting them put up in the right areas. We used a pr company to spread the word about the release which can cost as much as you want to spend but for a small campaign costs between £500 and £1000 usually for an online campaign and much more for the hard press to be covered. Then you can spend a few hundred for clubbing sites each to hit their databases with an advert or buy advertising banners on their actual websites or pay up to £2000 for a page advert in one of the dance music mags. 

The first few hundred CDs i sold and posted out personally to friends and contacts from my networking sites and mailing list before the official release date so it cost a lot in postage and packaging there. Also we had to use a large number of CDs (400 copies) to go out as DJ promo, to reviewers, press and as samplers to all the shops the distributor wanted to sell for us. So that only left us with 600 copies to actually distribute and sell although we did license the album out to a company to sell across Asia! We use a distribution company to sell the CDs on to the shops and only get a few quid per copy so there's really not much money in it unless you're a pop artist and are shifting tens of thousands of units!

How many more man hours go into it outside of actually writing/recording an album?

About 6 months full time work went into getting this album release out there.

How do you think we can beat piracy? ISPs cutting people off/new models like Spotify?

I think to beat piracy it needs to be made to look really un-cool and to be tougher on the pirates who are responsible. Higher profile cases of prison sentences and fines are needed for sites that are literally making loads of money out of advertising through giving away other artists work.

Spotify is great although it doesn’t create much income for labels or artists at this stage. If it get's massively popular then things much change since they will get higher revenue from advertising but again i think you would need to have hundreds of thousands of people listening to your music to ever earn any money out of it. 

Isn't file sharing just like recording off the radio and onto cassette like in days gone by?

Not at all: I don’t mind friends sharing music one to one, spreading the word on artists they like. What I can’t stand are these websites who are set up specifically to make money out of advertising and traffic from people who visit their sites to download artists work illegally and for free.

Mike skinner tweeted recently that people who moan about piracy are clearly making music for money, and not for the love of it.  What would you say to that?

I’m sure if he was still scraping around trying to pay the rent on his studio each month just so he could carry on producing music he would have a different attitude. It’s alright for him to say that now his royalty cheques and CD and download sales are already enough for him to retire on!

Do you think something like Richie Hawtin's twitter app that tweets each track he plays during a set could help in any way?

I’m sure it would help especially if it's linked up to sites where the songs can be downloaded from legally.

So, let's do some maths... The Office for National Statistics' Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) 2008 calculates the median salaray for full time UK employees at £25, 123. If it took Timo 6 solid months to write and record the album - that's not including all the post-production time spent arranging artwork, packaging, promo etc - it's fair to say in a 'normal' job, he would have earned about £12, 500, meaning he's effectively that much out of pocket already. If you then add up a mean of all the other costs mentioned and add them to £12, 500, you begin to get a picture of how much it costs to put out an album for an independent - as many are - dance label.

Even if people actually buy a copy of an album, a lot have to be sold before an artist even breaks even, let alone makes back the money they could have earned in a normal 9-5. If nothing else, this shows that artists like Timo really aren't in it for the money. And it shows that when even the few pennies musicians could potentially earn is taken by cyber pirates, making music is barely viable for independent and breakthrough artists.

Many thanks to Timo for sharing this info, now go buy his album....

berwickstreetrecords.com
myspace.com/timogarcia
beatport.com/artists/timo+garcia
iTunes