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November 2026

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Who bears the real cost of an album?

We look at the costs of recording, mixing, mastering and promotion, and at how platform money is split, using the figures available.

WyvOne Editör ·

Bir albümün gerçek maliyeti kime kalıyor?

It is impossible to give an album's cost as a single number. The breakdown Max Monahan wrote for Sonicbids in 2016 shows this well. In a table written in US dollars for a full-lineup rock band in the US, studio time runs from $1,000 to more than $40,000, the recording engineer from $200 to more than $8,000, mixing from $500 to more than $5,000, and mastering from $300 to more than $3,000. The article's overall range is about $1,700 (if nobody is paid for engineering, mixing and mastering) to more than $100,000. The figures are old and not from Turkey; still, they are useful for listing the items.

From recording to mastering

The first item is recording: the rental of the studio and the engineer who runs the session. The second is mixing. Mixing is the job of combining separately recorded tracks into a single stereo mix; balancing levels, placing sounds left and right, filtering frequencies and adding reverb and delay are done at this stage.

Representative image.

The third is mastering. The mastering engineer takes the finished mix and prepares it for release: making the album's songs sound close to one another, making sure they play consistently on different speakers, and formatting the file for the format it will be released in. For a CD, preparing track starts and ISRC codes is part of the job. Cover artwork ($0 to more than $2,000 in the Sonicbids table) and vinyl or CD pressing ($0 to more than $4,000) complete the list.

The author gives no figure for promotion. He says that for a band with many followers, promotion can cost more than the album itself.

Where does the money coming from the platform go?

After the album is out, money comes from streams, but not every stream is equal. With a rule announced on 21 November 2023, Spotify said it would not pay for tracks with fewer than 1,000 streams in the last 12 months. According to the company, 99.5 percent of streams pass this threshold; the remaining 0.5 percent amounts to about $40 million a year, and a track below the threshold earned an average of $3 a year. Spotify says this money will be distributed to the artists who pass the threshold.

According to Hypebot's account of Spotify's 2024 report, the company paid the music industry about $10 billion that year, and roughly half of it went to independent artists and rights holders. The same article puts the number of artists who earned more than $100,000 in royalties in a year at 12,500. Spotify's own site says it has paid about $70 billion to date and that an artist earning $10,000 most likely exceeded $30,000 across all their recorded music revenue.

There is no fixed amount per stream. Hypebot notes that coming up with a consistent per-stream figure is unreliable because of the many variables and intermediaries.

Spotify's share is growing too. According to the company's site, citing IFPI's 2025 global music report, Spotify accounts for about 30 percent of global recorded music revenue; in 2017 this share was below 15 percent. So an album's performance on the platform concerns an ever larger part of recorded music revenue.

Rights holders and Turkey

A song has two separate rights: composition and lyrics on one side, the recording (phonogram) on the other. The same person can own both, but does not have to. In Turkey this distinction is reflected in the professional associations as well.

According to its own site, MESAM has been active since 1986 and represents composers, lyricists, arrangers and publishers; it says it protects mechanical and performance rights, and it is a member of CISAC and BIEM. Mü-Yap, on the other hand, is the association of record producers, that is, phonogram producers holding neighbouring rights. It was founded in 2000 on the basis of Law No. 5846 on Intellectual and Artistic Works, had 194 members as of 2019, and announced in 2013 that it would withdraw from the digital market. An artist releasing their own album needs to learn their membership and licensing status directly from the associations.

We could not find reliable, current data on the average cost of an album in Turkey or on how platform revenue is split, so we give no figure. The data we have comes from abroad; it is enough to understand the items, but not enough to work out your own budget.

Sources

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