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My research question to help me study the economic principle is “How have new incentives such as technology and business models influence music production over the past decades?”
The article published on NPR called ‘How Much Does It Cost To Make a Hit Song’ demonstrates this economic principle by showing the costs associated with making popular music and how the costs have changed over the years.
First, the article discussed many of the methods that mainstream artists go through to make a song. I know that much of the music today that we listen to is actually not written by the artist, but after reading I was even more shocked and somewhat appalled to find out that the way these modern artists make music is highly inorganic. For example, when Rihanna decides to record some new music, they will hire a 40 person writing team to crank out lyrics to songs. Then all she does is listen to the music instrumental, find the one she likes, and pick the best lyrics and then she has a song. The writing camp for Rihanna cost over 200 thousand dollars, and each day they worked on making the album they spent at least 25 thousand dollars on average.
Second, the article went into more depth on how a song is made. When Rihanna is in the studio, she has a professional vocal coach that helps them sing certain lines. The cost of having a vocal coach ranges from $10,000-15,0000. The last step is to mix and master the song and that costs $15,000.
Third, the article spoke about how much it costs to advertise a new song or album to the public. It is estimated to cost about 1 million dollars. The reason it costs this much because everything needs to click at once. You want them to turn on the radio and hear Rihanna, turn on BET and see Rihanna, walk down the street and see a poster of Rihanna, look on Billboard, and even the iTunes chart.
In my next blog post, I will research the question: Why does music production sound different today as opposed to past decades?
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