Rihanna’s “Man Down” Cost A Pretty Penny

Posted on July 5th, 2011

Hey music buyers, or not. It is Jessica from the New.Music.Live. team. I think it is quite obvious that it costs a lot of money to make a superstar, the wardrobe, the hair, the transportation, the image consultation, the staff and of course the music itself. National Public Radio’s All Things Considered took a look at exactly how much money goes into making one of those huge international hits we air on our show and used Rihanna’s “Man Down” as an example.

The results were surprising even to me and I feel like I know a lot of the realities of the music business. The radio show made it clear that the numbers were not confirmed by Rihanna’s team but were found by interviews with industry insiders like Ray Daniels who was at Rihanna’s writing camp. Yes, a writing camp. At said camp, NPR says, a label hires the best pop writers and books as many as 10 studios and tasks the writers with drafting up songs for two weeks. Daniels speculated that the camp cost the label about $200,000. And guess how long it took them to write the songs for “Man Down”? 12 minutes! That is just one of the crazy costs and NPR made up a handy graph to break them all down.