Something scares me from a band point of view.
Let's say, $2000 seems a lot to most bands here, even if they are serious about their music.
Let's say, the album is a 2 years effort of writing, rehearsing, maybe playing a few gigs locally, spending countless hours of guitar/bass/drum playing.
Let's say the band is made of 4 members at least.
That makes, in 2 years, $250 a year a member, which is around 20 bucks a month per member.
If one thinks music drives his life, I don't really understand why he is so unwilling to pay for his own music quality, for what can be achieved by saving a little money each month.
Now you can add that there could be a label behind the production paying a lot of what this costs. That could realistically make this fall to being equivalent to saving $5 / member / month to have a decent sounding record.
EDIT : First when I went here and started understanding music production, I thought I would have fun by doing the cheap bedroom warrior locally. Since, I have understood a few of the mechanisms of the industry, even lived a few of them myself (mixed cheap for a "friend", even told him I would not do it for free, it was agreed, but in the end it never ended.) and decided I would probably go straight to the "at least a little serious" level by buying everything, getting legit, and charging what I diserve. Even if I'm not as good as a lot of people here.
Although, recently, a friend got paid $150 for a 6 hour DJing animation at a local party. He even tells himself he almost basically hits play/pause the good songs since most of what people ask is 80's fun music. And even when he actually mixes, it's damn easy (I was able to do it myself routing a 4x4 midi drumpad to some DJing software with midilearn functions and recorded a 20mn mix at once). When he looks at my reaper sessions, he says it's incredibly more difficult. So now I actually think mixing well should be paid well. Even if I don't wanna make it my first income.
