$30,000 is around €22.600... It depends. This is an ok budget for a band album if there's no travel or hotel costs or outside session musicians, techs, rental gear, arrangers etc. It costs about €500/day here in Finland to record in a quality studio with an engineer. Of course it helps if the producer can engineer him/herself but that's not always the case and cannot be required. I like to have an outside recording engineer on drum sessions.

Mixing an album can cost about €8.000 including the studio. This leaves €14.600 on the table. On a budget like this I'd ask €6.000 as a producer fee. So we're down to €8.600 which can buy us anywhere between 17 to 26 recording days (depending on the need for an engineer), which in the end is not too much but if the band is well-rehearsed it can happen. Of course in this situation the audio editing has to be done on mobile workstations/laptops. Last year I spent a 10-hour day of a family vacation doing vocal edits for an album. Not too cool...

Then if we are talking about a solo artist it's a totally different ballgame since you are paying the musicians as well. Here you can easily end up paying €1.000 for drummer and bassist each, €1.500 for guitarist and keyboard player each, then if you need additional musicians it's even more. So that's at least €5.000 gone right there. Of course the producer sometimes plays/programs stuff by himself.

So, in the end €22.600 isn't that much, is it? And this is Finland, one of the cheapest countries in the western world to produce music in. Ok, the price examples are based on quality studios but we are also talking major labels here.

I'd also love to see the cd prices drop. In here they cost around €22 in retail stores and €18 in internet stores. That's over $28 and $23! The net income (after VAT, distribution, mechanicals etc.) of a physical cd is about €10. If the band/artist is lucky enough to score a 10% royalty rate, it's gonna be €1/sold album AFTER BREAK-EVEN which is usually 100% of recording costs and 50% of any music videos. This is pretty easy math. It's also good to remember that 10.000 units shipped is gold and 20.000 units is platinum here. So, you'll get your break-even and platinum albums at the same time. Hooray! If the price of a physical cd drops it will also raise the break-even points and therefore reduce artist royalties since the labels will not change the deals for better, With a lot of artists signed through TV talent shows, it's actually getting worse...