The making of an Album
With the music industry ever evolving, anyone can now produce an album. But how many people actually know what goes into traditionally producing a record?
Album designs created by the design department at MacEwan University as part of a competition held by Bent River Records. Photo credit: Kelsie Johnston
The music industry is one that is forever evolving. From records to cassettes ti CDs to digital. The way we listen to and interact with an album is always changing.
According to Sheldon Rocha Leal from Medium, artists have begun to reevaluate the way they engage with their audience, placing more emphasis on “singles” rather than full albums. How we produces these singles or albums is also changing to the point where anyone can do it.
Regardless though, the process, whether it be recording a single or an entire album is the same. But in a world where anyone can produce music, who actually knows what goes into the traditional practice of making an album?
As it turns out, the process of creating an album can take many different directions – it all depends on the artist.
The whole process hinges on the initial ideas and decisions made by the artist. It is up to them to drive their vision and assemble their team. That’s where producers, like Paul Johnston, come in.
Johnston, co-founder of Bent River Records at MacEwan University, has years of experience both playing and producing music, and even has six Junos to back it up. As a producer, it is him that artists call when they want to produce an album.
“I’m a contractor,” say Johnston. “Somebody calls me for a record, and I think, hey, this record would be really good to do in a church. And so then I get all the gear I need and I go do it in a church or a studio or wherever.”
While the vision is up to the artist, the creation process is nothing without its team. However, the bigger the team, the more expensive an album becomes to produce. Johnston estimates that an album could cost anywhere from six to $20,000 to produce, with some reaching as high as $40,000, and more often than not, they projects are entirely self-funded.
Then, after the record is complete, the record label gets involved.
“The way most labels work, is you come to a label with a finished record,” says Johnston. “And then you’re going and you’re giving it to them.”
The label then manages the album, from marketing to distribution.
Nowadays, however, you don’t need the fancy studios, the musicians for hire, or the big-shot producer with a five-figure budget. An album can be produced with merely a laptop and dream.
According to The Honest Broker, in 2023, Billboard reported that SoundCloud added 45 million tracks to their site over the course of a year. A number that works out to roughly 123,000 new songs every day.
With the ability to produce music with only a laptop and the outpouring of new music that hits streaming site each day, the music industry has become a difficult place to navigate and it is becoming harder and harder for artists to stand out. It also means that recording studios and record labels are bearing the cost of the changing playing field.
“I think that around the world, we’re seeing major studios closed all over the place because it’s not financially feasible,” says Johnston.
But just because the field is changing, doesn’t mean that the art of traditional music production is dying. It’s merely shifting to universities.
“Historically, classical music didn’t use to revolve around the universities, but it definitely does now,” says Johnston. “And, in the 1950s, the first university in the world to really offer a jazz studies program was North Texas. And now, almost every university in the world that has a music department has a jazz department, and most of the internationally famed jazz performers teach at a university.”
While he suspects it won’t be in his life time, Johnston believes that with the way the music industry evolves and changes, pop music will eventually join the ranks of classical and jazz music.
Luckily with universities still offering these programs, and the technological advances we’ve seen in the industry, music and the production process is more accessible than ever.
Bent River Records was created as an opportunity for students at MacEwan University to learn more about the management side of music. Through the arts and cultural management program at MacEwan, students are able to intern at the label, working side by side with industry professionals and artists.
In the future, Johnston aims to create a network of university record labels to help keep the music industry accessible to students.
“Nowadays, I think, there’s more music being created than there ever has been in the past,” says Johnston. “If you look at the 1950s and kind of the golden era of jazz, there’s the elite class of musicians who got recorded and nobody else did because it was expensive and it wasn’t accessible to everybody.”
