Being A Rock Star? Easy! Cheap!

By Julene McCoy in Arts & Entertainment on Dec 13, 2005 6:04PM

We were reading this article in the Tribune today and decided that this glimpse of how easy it is to become a star is quite a farce. Unless, of course, the star in the making just happens to already be rich and has the right contacts. See: Paris Hilton. At the very least here are some costs to what is supposedly so easy to do: create, hype and distribute music from home.

For this purpose, we are assuming that the soon to be Grammy winner has a computer, all the instruments she would need to complete a recording for a song (yeah, that’s cheap), and the knowledge of how to use all of the following software that would be required according to the Trib, plus the contacts that they assume this relative unknown has with critics, radio stations, bloggers, a publicist (yeah right *rolling eyes*), and a mailing list of 12,000 fans. We’re also assuming that the timeframe they have decided to use is bogus – due to the fact that any self-respecting rock star would never be out of bed at 7 am.

Here we go: Pro Tools for recording: $249; Amp Farm, a digital amp simulator: $595; Recti-Fi, digital distortion plug in: $395; Auto-Tune, massages off key singing back on tune: $430; Final Cut Pro, edits video: $899.

This is about $2600 worth of software alone, add into that the cost of the computer, internet access, paying a publicist, all the instruments needed for the sound this artist desires and I would say the average “starving artist” probably would not be able to afford all this unless Mommy and Daddy helped out. The article also states that this artist has never played live, so there is no income except for the downloading of his songs, which are also assumed to already be for sale on Napster, Rhapsody, and iTunes. Chicagoist assumes such an artist may not need to rely on MySpace.com to get her where she wants to be, because she might already be there.

This is supposed to be a fanciful take and we agree – it definitely is fanciful to believe that every artist has all of this at their disposal when they are a relative unknown.