I'm watching
CBC News Sunday, and there's an interview with Alannah Myles. Apparently, she just got her first royalty cheque. April 1st 2008. Her records made $160 million dollars, and she just got her first royalty cheque, 18 years after recording her first album. On the face of it, this looks a lot like a textbook re-enactment of Steve Albini's
Some of your friends may already be this fucked or Courtney Love's speech where she
does the math.
Now here comes the difficult part. She claims that all of her previous royalties went to pay off the $7 million that she owed the record company.
The more I think about it, the more I think this is an extravagant amount.
$ 7m for two albums. Even with the most expensive producers, and the most expensive studios, and the most expensive backup bands, and videos, and all of the other expenses that go into making a "hit record". That's 3.5 million per album.
Adding up all the album expenses in "fucked" I get a number around 450,000. Now, even given that Atlantic may have wanted to make a bigger splash than Albini's theoretical indie band, I can see tripling that number. This is absolutely inconceivable to me. Most of the people I know, their biggest expense is in studio time, and mixing and mastering, and that usually, comes out to maybe 20 - 30 grand. But let's say that all of the expenses in making the album came out to 1.5 mil.
That still leaves $2mil / album
Now I think, OK, I can't imagine how a record could cost 3.5 mil, so what's being left out? How did she end up owing her record company $7million dollars? I can imagine all kinds of bad decisions being made, if you don't listen to that little voice in your head. If you don't realize that all this money that's being spent on, I dunno, red m&m's or some bullshit like that. That's all yours, and maybe you should keep some track of it.
What other bad decisions did she make along the way?