Start at the very beginning (or how I learnt to stop loving holidays and start loving small rooms)

It seems at the moment everyone has an opinion on filesharing and whether music and film is a entity that should be available to all for free, or at a premium cost. What is interesting however is the lack of knowledge that most people seem to have about the basic facts behind these opinions. I think for us to start understanding exactly what is going on with this situation we should try and get a few solid facts into the equation. Being someone who has been in and around the music industry for several years we are going to focus on this side of the topic (apologies to any film buffs out there!).

Unless your phenomenally lucky, or an X-Factor winner there are large amounts of outlays from the moment you decide that the life of a rock and roll star is for you. Firstly you have to buy your equipment (or if your very lucky get it brought for you!). Thinking about my own band, my guitarist uses a Rickenbacker guitar (£1,500) with a Telecaster back up (£400(ish)). He plays through a 2nd hand Vox amp (£750). I am remarkably poor, have a Fender Bass (£600 with staff discount (my past is slightly colourful)) and an Ashdown amp (£500). The drummer has a Yamaha drumkit with 3 cymbols, as well as the hi-hats (£2600).  Next time you see a band in a pub remember there could be well over £5,000 worth of gear infront of you without really even breaking a sweat.

Before you can start playing a gig you have to get good. Studios in London start at around £50 for 4 hours. You probably need to practice at least once a week, I always recommend twice if possible. Playing a gig is also quite an expense – van hire (£100 a day), or taxi (£outragous amounts) to get the stuff to the venue followed by food, beer, buying drinks for people who support your band week in-week out averages out (for me at least) at about £50 a show. We play around 8 shows a month.

This is before your band has even thought about getting signed and making it into a career.

You have played your gigs and got a couple of songs you think are going to set the world on fire, so you need to record it. Depending on where you go to record it these costs can give even a vaguely successful musician nights of sleeplesssness, and the constant dilema – do you sacrifice the sound to save money, or sacrifice that weekend in Barcelona with the other half for that extra special production. Sadly for my misses its always the latter! Recently we recorded our latest single. Normal signed bands would aim to record and produce a song in around 4 days (depending on a WORLD of factors but bare with me!) we recorded and produced two songs in a weekend in a very middle of the range studio. It cost us £1700. This is cheap – I agreed to play keyboard and the guitarist guitar for them on two sessions for free in exchange for some money being taken off and for us to work with their top in house producer. You’ll find a lot of this sort of wheeling dealing going on at the grass roots of this industry. It then costs £100 an hour for the tracks to be mastered (brought to a sound level that they can be played on the radio). Two hours later we had the tracks in our hot and sweaties, and didn’t eat that evening.

We then sent our tracks to our label to get pressed onto a limited run of 7″ vinyl (£1200 for 400) and I spent the next weeks evenings burning cd copies to send out to radio stations, magazines, record labels, management labels, publishing houses, music lawyers, anyone who could like us and give us a leg up into playing with the big boys. Replies are few and far between (remember there are hundreds of people all vying for these opportunities) we found we were getting 1 in about 20, but after hearing other horror stories we were doing well.

Now, if your very lucky, your in the position where your about to get signed…

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