I was talking to a band the other day and they were so happy since they will go and record in USA.

– We gonna record with *** a producer name***.

Thinking to myself, who the fuck is that? Okey this is not my style so maybe this person has done things I don’t know. But for one thing sure, this is not a household name. On the other side mention a producer who is? I guess Max Martin, George Martin, Dr Dre.

But even legendary producers like Rick Rubin are to the bigger audience kind of unknown. Most my friends that are not in to music don’t know Rick Rubin, Mutt Lange or Bob Rock even though they did classical albums.

I looked up that producer afterwards, and yes the producer has done some famous names. Still probably not one of their more famous work. Still I guess it’s probably someone that will do a good job making the recording sound good.

So my next question was:

– Cool, how are you gonna release it?

The band just looked at me. And I could see that they didn’t understand what I asked.

– Well we gonna release it through our label!

Duh…I know that. But since you spend hell of a lot of money traveling to USA. Recording with this producer (I guess the producer cost to hire) and hire studio time. I was more interested how you got to get it out to the audience. What I was seeking after was to see if they knew that a producers name is usually worth NOTHING. Yes it’s a teddy bear for some journalist to write about it. But it becomes more and more irrelevant. If you spend all this money you should have some darn plan to release it. In this case the artist is signed to a small shitty indie label that just discovered the word internet. They still care more about the physical copies then streams and lives quite much in the old world. Sure you can pull some stunt tricks in local media about the producer. But over all, hell no, it won’t drive any fans or sales.

Okey in this case they will blame it on the style. That this is harder for an audience to find, to listen to and they are smarter then the other. Yada Yada Yada, I hear this all the time for artists that fails. The error will be that they spend all this money and have no plan how to get it out. When it gets out it will crash.

If I had only two dollar left, I would spend one dollar on PR, said Bill Gates. I can just see this project spending four dollars on the recording. And here it is, I see it so many times before. You put your trust in the recording, not the PR. Because that is what you as an artist think is fun. Still that is not what breaks an artist. Actually I would rather talk to the PR team of a famous album then the producer. The strange part that never happens. All the TV shows is about this band and producer describing how they made a certain sound. In the end of the day it was the PR team that made that sound famous. If you didn’t have them it would have ended up in that large majority of “great” recordings that no one has heard of.

And yes, whit a higher PR budget you can get a lousier recording to get more heard. Just look below.