Manufacturing the Song of the Summer

 

How Much Does it Cost to Make a Hit Song??..

 

The fight to create the song of the summer is the music industry's biggest challenge. Rhianna's "Man Down" is struggling to become the song of the summer. Rhianna's label flies in songwriters and producers from around the company for a "writing camp", which is a pop-up version of the old hit factories that churned out pop tunes. Investing in the writing camp is expensive but the real money does not start flowing until after the song is done.

At a writing camp, a record label hires the best music writers in the country and drops them into the nicest recording studios in town for about two weeks. It's a temporary version of the old music-industry hit factories, where writers and producers cranked out pop songs. At the writing camp, the songwriters show up with no music, and producers toting music tracks with no words.

After $78,000 to make the song, and another $1 million to roll it out, Rhianna's "Man Down" gets added to radio play lists across the country, gets a banner ad on iTunes and may still not even be a hit.

Paying over $1 million dollars to make a song is ridiculously expensive. After spending all that money and not having your track be a hit could hit the business hard because the writers, producers, vocalists will not make as large of a profit of what they spent. I think it would be intelligent to first ask people what they thought of the song before actually recording it and wasting all that time and money and then not having your song a number one hit.