Recording Studios

When an artist goes into a recording studio to cut an album, the money for the session is usually paid by a record company in the form of an advance against the artist’s royalties on the eventual sale of the record. The success of the studio business, therefore, is tied directly to the performance of the record industry at large. In recent years, that’s meant hard times for studio operators.

For example, according to the Recording Industry Assn. of America, the major record companies released 4,170 new albums in 1978. The following year, as the record industry began to feel the effects of declining sales, only 3,575 new albums were released. In 1980, the number fell to 3,000. By 1984, with the record industry in a full-blown depression, the number had dropped to 2,170--a decline of nearly 50% from just four years before. In 1985, the number of new releases started inching upward again as the record industry began recovering from its slump.

The problem is, the recovery has been fueled largely by the sale of older records reissued on compact discs--records that don’t require additional time at the recording studio. Last year, with record company profits at an all-time high, the major companies released only 2,406 new albums--still far below their output 10 years ago.

Making matters worse for the studios, belt-tightening by the record companies has reduced the average recording budget for an album from about $125,000 a few years ago to between $80,000 and $100,000 today, according to studio operators. And with home studios siphoning off recording time, studio operators estimate that their share of an average album’s recording budget has fallen to between 50% and 60%.

In 1967, the Beatles’ classic album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” was recorded using what was then state-of-the-art studio technology--a four-track tape-recording machine. That meant that four different elements--vocals, guitars, drums and piano--were recorded separately and then combined on a single half-inch tape. In the ensuing 21 years, technological advances in sound recording have made four-track recording seem almost as primitive as, well, chiseling in stone.

Today, the state of the art is 48-track recording. For music lovers, the advances have meant better-sounding records; for studio operators, they’ve meant huge expenses. A 24-track recorder--considered the minimum for professional recording--can cost $25,000 to $90,000. A 32-track digital recorder costs about $140,000.

One studio operator estimates that to keep up with technology and remain competitive, a studio must completely upgrade its equipment “every 2 1/2 or three years--consoles, tape machines, new mikes, the whole schmear.”

When Chris Stone opened his famous Record Plant studio in 1968, “fully equipped, including construction, right down to the floor tile, it cost $75,000,” he said. “Today, that same room would cost $1.5 million.”

After a five-year onslaught of computerized pop music--what one sound engineer described as “two-skinny English kids, a synthesizer and a drum machine”--studio operators say they are witnessing a backlash. “Right now, the cutting edge is live music; some of the new young bands are looking down on synthesized sound,” said one veteran recorder, adding with a chuckle, “They actually think they’ve discovered something new; they’re calling it ‘organic recording.’ ”