Top 100 Notorious Examples Of Music-Business Excess.

From The Best of Happy Mondays

"The band headlined the Glastonbury festival that summer although Shaun admits he remembers nothing of it. Foreign success also beckoned including the Rock in Rio festival. In the summer of 1991 they headlined a gig for 30,000 people at Leeds Elland Road football stadium. The gig was a triumph, closing with an eight minute version of Wrote for Luck. Then the rot started to set in. The drugs stories weren't funny anymore. Shaun was addicted to heroin. He said Sinead O'Connor needed a "good fucking" and then apologised. Feminists were described as "fat, ugly cows" and Shaun and Bez posed in Penthouse surrounded by naked girls. "We were taking the piss for fuck's sake" Bez recollected. "We'd go along to interviews out of our 'eads. They just wound us up and watched us go. Then you see the papers and it's like 'Fuck! Did I say that?' We didn't mean half of it and couldn't remember most of it." The backlash was about to begin.

In late 1991 (dates?) the band went to Barbados to record the much awaited follow up to Pill's n' Thrills. A story leaked home about Bez smashing up a fleet of buses. It was true, he broke his arm. The sessions were reported to be very tense and the music piss-poor. Shaun was now taking 20 rocks of crack a day. At one point, when they had just finished making the album, Shaun held the mastertapes of the album in his hand and shook them furiously as he screamed down the phone to Tony Wilson. He basically told Wilson that if he didn't get £40,000 wired to him that afternoon he'd smash the tapes. Factory was already in trouble and were depending on this album to bail them out so Wilson had to get the money. He re-mortgaged his house.

When the album came out in 1992 it was savaged by the English music press."

From Top 10 Expensive Music Videos

An 11-minute video extravaganza, this video tells the supposed tale of singer Axl Rose and model Stephanie Seymour getting married, having a party, and living out their lives together until death. And all it took was 11 minutes? . . . A classy video that combines storytelling with live concert performances, Guns N' Roses actually paid for the video themselves, to insure that it looked as they envisioned.

Wedding dress: $8,000

Specially constructed coffin: $8,000

Renting a symphony orchestra: $25,000

Specially constructed chapel: $150,000

Total cost of the video: $1,500,000+

8) KLF burn a million quid to make a point about something.

As ambitious as the Works Volume I album was, it was no match for what the band had up its sleeve for the road show. Fulfilling a life long dream of Keith Emerson's, ELP launched its seventh US Tour with a full symphony orchestra and choir consisting of 75 union musicians. They were taken from a pool of over 1,500 musicians auditioned by the band in six cities around the world.

In 1977, Emerson, Lake & Palmer was touring with an entourage of over 130 people, and a daily payroll cost of $20,000 per day. The tour ran into further complications when union regulations prevented the band from more than three shows a week or travel over 250 miles per day. These regulations made routing nearly impossible and made it financially impossible for the band to make any money with anything less than a sell out wherever the tour went. Before the start of the tour, the band knew it would take a lot just to break even, but after two weeks, they were on track to lose over $3 million dollars. The truth was painfully evident: the orchestra would have to be dropped. A week later, it was.

But somewhere along the line Billy felt that he was a better man for realizing quantity was better than quality and that he should release everything he wrote.

The latest Blind Guardian is a step down in quality (I admittedly like quite a bit of it due to some of the songs having decently melodies) due to the complete overblown nature of it. It's so overblown, it went around the corner and came back on the other side and sounds like it's actually MISSING something.

the first CD of this was definitely one of the best things that year ('99?). actually a lot of the things cited here so far i like a lot. not sure what to make of that.

Michael Jackson's videos have always been ridiculously expensive. In 1983, he spent $800,000 on "Thriller," which would be about $1.4 million today. But remember that before "Thriller," no one even came close to spending that kind of money, and he had to do it with limited technological capabilities. As technology improved, Jacko's videos became more expensive, spending over $1.2 million on "Black or White" in 1992, and even more on "Remember The Time." But if he can keep an oxygen chamber, a petting zoo, the Elephant Man's bones, and an entire plastic surgery team in his mansion, it's certainly no biggie to drop another $7 mil on a video with his sister.

"Scream's" $7,000,000 price tag is more than twice as much as the next most expensive music video (Puff Daddy's "Victory" at $2.7 million), and it's easy to see why: he spent $5 million alone on 11 sets. Yet while watching the video, it all seems incredibly wasteful, not coming close to the film quality of "Thriller", "November Rain," or "Victory."

Computer-generated spaceship: $65,000
Breaking guitars: $53,000
Morphing artworks: $50,000
Michael's makeup: $3,000
Janet's makeup: $8,000 a day
Choreography: $40,000
Giant video screen: $80,000
Lighting: $175,000
Cost per day: $636,000 (about 11 days)
Total cost of 11 sets: $5,000,000

$8000 a day on make up!!!

the ENROMOUS amount of money that had to be paid to independent promoters to get Pink Floyd's The Wall on the radio.

Is this true? I'm a huge Floyd fan and I've never heard anything like it.

32. a catch-all for ridiculous riders: [Removed Illegal Link]

Well what do you know, chicken and orange juice actually are on A Tribe Called Quest's rider.

― joygoat, Tuesday, 8 May 2007 21:41 (nineteen years ago)