Recording Industry Finds Sales In DVDs
from the oh,-look-at-that... dept
Well, it looks like at least some folks in the recording industry are out looking for other ways to make money. While DVDs and video games have been eating into CD sales, the recording industry is trying to push their way into what's hot, and music DVD sales are booming. The DVDs tend to include lots of additional stuff that fans are really interested in -- which makes them worth buying. Look at that: giving fans something worth buying and they actually buy it. What will they think of next?
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But you don't care: you just want your $9.99 DVD with hours of music and video.
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The 'duh' factor
Also, the DVDs tend to have variations on the songs or insights into what the song is about which for many people, myself at least, is what I like to hear and can give me a new appreciation for a song.
And to produce, they are CHEAP. The bands going to play, hire a couple of guys to shot video and then give the footage to a editor with FinalCut Pro or Media100 on thier Mac and you can produce a reasonably good DVD for distribution.
So what do you think Mike ... give the music away for free and make the live DVDs the pay for products ? Or is that still counter to your proposals for music sharing ? Course the next thing that will wind up on the P2P networks will be the videos. Sucks to be in the music business.
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A good value
I'm glad to see that the music industry is waking up and seeing that consumers ARE willing to pay for content. Content that IS valuable AND provides a good amount of material for its cost.
I'm REALLY excited about the new formats that will have the DVD on one side & the CD on the other ! For me, this makes the disk valuable and one that I am willing to purchase. Being able to have music, data & video produced professionally on on disk is worth 20 or so bucks.
20 bucks for audio only isn't.
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Re: The 'duh' factor
Well, I mean, you as an artist could be cheap; you could "hire" a couple of friends with video cameras on the cheap to shoot garden-hose video. Of course, it wouldn't look anything resembling normal commercial production, and of course, consumers aren't going to pay the $20 for your band when the same $20 will buy them super-produced media from Warner or Sony acts...
To lend some context here, a friend of mine put together a proposal for The Rolling Stones to produce multi-camera DVD's of the shows. His out-of-pocket was projected @ $120,000/show to produce DVD quality video (5 cameras, editing truck, etc).
Because I'm all coffeed up this AM, let's do some quick math - see how "cheap" this could be.
Let's say our fictional band wants to record a 1-hour show for DVD production. They could put an ad on Craigslist and "hope for the best" with getting a cameraperson, or actually hire a semi-pro/pro DP to get the best quality footage.
Let's pretend our fictional band is smart enough to hire a competent DP. Is one enough?
No.
Gotta have more than one camera operating. Let's say two. Semi-pro DP's tend to run $300/hr. Let's assume they love this band to death, and will do it for $100 apiece. So, $200 on people. Maybe another $100 on tape. $300.
Then there's editing. Most indie editors i've worked with bill from $20/hr on up. So, let's assume the editor LOVES this band, and works for his minimum. Two hours MIN just to dog the footage, so that's $40 just to copy it to the editing system. Figure a 1:1 ratio (1 hours for every one minute of edited video), and we're looking at roughly 60 hours of work to edit a one-hour concert together. Prob another 8 hours for audio-post.
Running total: $1,960
Authoring for DVD is a slightly intense process for the folks we can afford, so we'll budget 12 hours for authoring, and $150 for media (we WILL burn coasters).
Running total: $2,050 (80hrs x $20 = $1,600 (labor), $450 for media (tape, DVD-R's)
And now, manufacturing. Discmakers (the most probable candidate for fabrication) can do a run of 1000 for $1,890.
Running total: $4,040
Ok, so our $4K outlay buys us 1000 copies. To break even mathematically, we could sell them for $4ea. At $10 each, profit is mathematically pretty solid, as the paper-potential is $10,000 income.
So for $10, the fan of the band gets a one-hour DVD of questionable quality (audio will probably suck, video will have inevitable moments of ugliness, etc), which may or may not be good for the band.
The POINT here is this: DVD's are not particularly cheap or easy to produce for bands, and are not very commercially viable unless said band has $4k (in this case) to invest *AND* the potential to sell those 1000 units fast enough to make their money back.
(insert non-related phone conversation here)
I'm completely off track now - hope i managed to communicate something here.
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Re: The 'duh' factor
The Editor is by far the steepest part of the cost. I assume that you could put 4 camera men on the act just to get the footage. And the price should go at 9.99 , minimum, a pop. Extra's , liners, arts, bios, etc can be used to bring the price up. Set it up as being web interative such that you can drive the viewer to the groups website for more e-commerce potential or at least to keep them hooked as a fan.
Putting together a DVD should be significantly cheaper than putting a band into a studio for 6 weeks to 6 months to cut a new CD. One editor and a Producer who knows what they are doing and you have mass merchandise for very little investment.
Obviously the more complex the act and set up, the more thought may have to be given to it. But your band that takes the stage to play just needs to do their thing and the camera's just need to be steady, in focus, and able to keep up.
Next thought. Why not a DVD collection of an act on tour. You could get a 6 DVD set of say .... Eric Clapton's 16 city tour .. or something along those lines. Assuming, and this is a big big big assumption these days, that they artist is actually performing live, each act should be somewhat different. True groupies would eat that kind of stuff up.
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Re: The 'duh' factor
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