Day 1, album #3?

[Miguel]

Pleasantly surprised to hear Haley's still at the studio.

Looking up info about studio time, I found this testimony (related to the Mechanical Royalty Rate) from 2006 by the president and CEO of Concord before the "Copyright Royalty Judges."

It basically says recording companies spend a lot more on production and promotion than publishing companies.

Record companies make enormous investments in finding and developing new musical talent and producing records. We have an artists and repertoire ("A&R") staff that manages our existing artist rosters and actively searches for new recording artists. Once we have signed an artist, the process of making an album begins. This often involves our A&R staff working with the artist to develop the concept for the album and identifying songs that are appropriate to the artist's style. Concord must arrange and pay for studio time, equipment, sound engineers, musicians, arrangers, and often a producer to create the initial studio recordings and then edit, mix and master the music to create the final, high-quality sound for release. We also design album cover artwork and produce additional content, such as video content, that are associated with the album release. Most of the time, we also have to pay an advance to the recording artist. Our overall cost of producing an album can be anywhere from $ __ to $ __ , with many of our albums requiring a production investment of $ __

They redacted the dollar amounts, but the last "production investment" cited seemed quite a bit longer than the others.

Even great songs and great recordings don't make money for their creators unless they connect with an audience... Our costs of promoting a release are usually much more than our costs of production.

Most publishers have an A&R function associated with signing writers and sometimes producing demos of their songs. However, artists are more often "discovered" by record companies and then sign publishing deals than vice versa. And the costs of producing the occasional songwriter demo pale in comparison to the costs of producing high-quality commercial recordings.

Publishers have a limited marketing function - typically marketing songs to producers of motion pictures, television programs and advertisements. But publishers don't invest in branding their composers through expensive consumer advertising. When is the last time anyone saw a television commercial for a hot songwriter? At one time, decades ago, music publishers were actively involved in promoting songs to record companies. However, in most genres today, those efforts so seldom pay off that we do not do much of that, and I am reasonably sue that, outside of Nashville, other publishers do not either. In fact, I can say with certainty that, as a very active record company engaged in the production of numerous new recordings per year, we rarely get calls from publishers suggesting songs to be included in those productions. As a result, where record companies have huge promotional costs, publishers have very little.

Music publishers have some costs of administration, but the staff necessary to grant and administer licenses is a fraction of that required on the recorded music side to create and promote new recordings.

In our role as a publisher, I do not need to worry about the success of particular recordings. Our publishing business incurs only a small administrative cost to license use of a musical work in a recording, and we get paid from the very first record sold. As a publisher, we like to see recordings of our songs succeed, because it is recordings that give commercial life to songs. When recordings succeed, we see bigger mechanical royalty checks, as well as meaningful performance royalties, and have a better chance of licensing synch uses in motion pictures, television programs and advertising and even selling sheet music. But our publishing business suffers no loss from the failure of a recording of one of its songs, because our publishing business does not incur the costs of recording and distributing songs.

https://www.loc.gov/crb/proceedings/2006...mended.pdf

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Rachel and Avelene found it's someone else's photo

It's been used by many others too. Hard to figure out the original source.