OCT 31 — I think we’re about two or three weeks away from the release of my band’s new album, titled “Pop Tak Masuk Radio”. After spending much of Ramadan this year working hard rehearsing and recording the album, we’re edging closer and closer to the final mixes of the album’s songs, and as excitement builds up I also find myself thinking more and more about the business part of music. And you know what, I already feel kind of rebellious; I want to come out with at least one new album every year, looking at the state of things are now.

It’s common knowledge now that the Internet, mobile phones and the whole downloading phenomenon has changed the music industry forever. We hear all the right noises being made by industry people in articles and interviews about how technology is going to revolutionise everything from production to distribution, and that new business models have to be tried out in order for the industry to survive.

I read all the time about how record sales are getting worse and worse every year, and in the case of the Malaysian music industry, how there are even fewer new Malaysian products being released by the major labels here, with they almost exclusively just recycling their back catalogue over and again, hence the unfortunate deluge of one compilation after another that we’ve been seeing the past few years.

The argument for such an approach is actually quite understandable, which is that production costs for a local album are so high that it does not make good business sense at all to spend so much on something that is not going to sell that much and might not even recoup the costs in the first place.

And this is from companies that sell local albums for an average of RM29.90 each. We sold our last album for only RM10 each by hand, and RM15 at the shops that were kind enough to carry them. Right off the bat we get loads of people asking whether we can make any money selling the CDs that cheap. And it’s other indie bands asking us these kinds of questions, not the major label people. Imagine what they’ll think of us. Probably that we failed business and accounting in college. Ha ha.

Well, I may not have a business degree, but I do know that keeping your costs sensible is one way to do things. It is a measure of how bloated the industry has become that the average cost of recording and mixing an album in Malaysia, which can veer from anywhere between RM30,000 and RM100,000, can actually be used by us to make multiple albums, maybe at least four or five of them!

Yes, quality is always an issue. You pay peanuts, you get monkeys, people say. But in this day and age of technology, you just need to be creative about things to find ways to cut corners without compromising on quality. Take, for example, our new album.

Learning from our experience with our previous albums, we’ve realised that with recordings, the most important thing is the source recording. Get that source recorded well, then you will have less of a headache when it comes to mixing. So just do your research and find which studio can probably best capture the sound you want. With us, we just wanted to make a big rock record the old fashioned way. So we went to one of the oldest studios in Malaysia. Yes, it’s a fancy and pricey studio, but since studios charge by the hour the best way to minimise your recording costs is to find a way to spend as little time as possible recording.

So we did exactly that. We rehearsed like mad, and recorded as “live” as possible. Things that might slow us down and take up too much time were crossed off our checklist. We just made sure the performances were recorded well (whether the performances were good or not, well that’s another story, ahahaha).

Once you’re done recording, then you find a good engineer to mix the recordings. Let me tell you, this is not cheap at all. With our previous albums, I just sat down with the recording engineer after he had edited the files and did the mixing together with him, and just get charged by the hour, which I made sure wouldn’t take too long. And that was one way to do it. The normal way is to get a mixing engineer to do it, and they usually charge you per song.

Again, the cost to do this here is almost ridiculously high. “Special” rates for indie bands can go to as high as RM600 per song (imagine what the major labels have to fork out) and average to about RM200 to RM300 per song mostly. If you have 10 songs on your album, that’s RM2,000 or RM3,000 just for mixing, and that’s the “indie” rate! Add to that mastering costs that average around a further RM2,000, and manufacturing costs that average around a further RM2,300 plus for 1,000 CDs, and add to that the recording costs, it’s easy to think that this is all very expensive.

However, we now live in a global age. Loads of people all over the world do music production, and quite a number of them are even better than the people here in our country, and cost considerably less. You just need to look. That’s what we did this time around with the mixing and mastering of our upcoming album. No “support local” or “go local” tendencies for me. If you’re good, you’re good. And if you’re cheaper, and there’s no moral baggage (like child labour — aha... we DON’T condone that!), then what’s stopping us, right?

So do watch out for our new album, folks. It’s the cheapest album we’ve made so far, but I think it’s the most expensive sounding one we’ve done yet. And if we can do it, so can you.