[Sarge]

Originally Posted by Pudding

Unless Meat becomes an independent record company, I'm not sure who'd back paying for another CD being made based on HCTB sales

A lot of artists have founded their own labels and if you think that your record company hasn't done that much with regard to marketing, it maybe wouldn't be such a bad idea to organize production, promo and distribution yourself. The reason for having a contract with a big record label usually is the fact that they have more means available to extensively promote an album. If that doesn't happen to the extent that you expect, you can as well try to do it on your own. Might be more work for you, will probably cost you some time and money and could be risky but at least you'd have more control over how things are being done.

Originally Posted by Pudding

So you have 600,000 (apparently) x 15 euro's(ish) =9,000,000 - that's a good figure. But what about minus the bands fee, the studio fee, Rob Cavallo's fee, the lawyers fees, guest artists fees, songwriters fees, publishing fees, pressing of the CD fee, shipping fees, marketting fee (that should be a low figure) and any other bills you could possibly think of, what figure do you end up with then?

Good question.

Originally Posted by AndrewG

It's just that out of the many recent Meat albums I have, I would probably not recommend this one and also I usually buy two copies and give one to my mother but I didn't do that with this one as I know she won't like it as it's far too aggressive, offensive and loud for her (Like a Rose/Dick Pants song/Love is not Real).

My mom probably wouldn't like it either but some of my younger friends and relatives like most of the stuff on HCTB. I usually hear comments like "That's Meat Loaf? Wow! Sounds cool. Wouldn't have expected that he's in such good shape again."

Originally Posted by AndrewG

I am not sure what justifies huge expectations anyway as the best selling artists these days all seem to be younger than 25, team up with several rap artists to make one song, use Auto tune to change their voice completely and don't do live performances, have a dance entourage on stage or are winners of a recent pop show contest.

You can be successful without belonging to that category. I think it depends on how an artist appeals to the public, if the music has anything special about it and how good the marketing is. In 1993, everybody I knew seemed to own a copy of Bat II although it wasn't the kind of music that was popular then. There are still bands who manage to remain on top of the charts for several months because they have been working hard, are different from others and due to good promo. I believe it's much harder to get people interested in good music these days though.

Originally Posted by Pudding

I'm also hoping that there isn't some daft-arsed story trying to link all the songs together.

Meat's misconception of what a concept album is is one of the very few things that bother me about HCTB.