Funny Failure Stories

[Lumiere]

Hello.

Today I was was reading Q magazine, and read about the unmitigated failure that Kevin Rowland's "My Beauty" was. It cost 270,000 to make (not counting promotional stuff, a music video and pressing the actual CDs) and sold...700 copies. The only way the company would've recouped their cash was if they sold each copy for £385 each...I know for a fact The Unicorn bought a copy.

EDIT: Forgot to put this: Has anyone heard any funny music failure stories? Any stories of ridiculous expenditure on music etc.?

[Ghost of Troubled Joe]

Loveless by My Bloody Valentine apparently cost £1million in production costs, and nearly bankrupted Creation Records and sent both Kevin Shields and Alan McGee into nervous breakdowns...

Don't know if it's true (Shields always claimed Loveless didn't cost nearly as much to make), but it's a damn good story.

[Lumiere]

No, it legit did cost that much to make.

EDIT: Oddly, that kevin rowland album was on 'creation' too.

[El Unicornio, mang]

...I know for a fact The Unicorn bought a copy.

Oi! :-b

Didn't Peter Andre recently attempt  a comeback tour and ended up only selling about 12 tickets?

[BetaKarraTene]

Didn't Peter Andre recently attempt  a comeback tour and ended up only selling about 12 tickets?

Sadly not.  The figures that were quoted in the stories were only first week sales.  I checked the ticket availabilities a bit nearer the tour (I was just checking - honest!) and most of the venues had sold out.  I realise now I'd be much happier if I hadn't had bothered checking.

It would appear that giving an excessive advance to  band is one of the stupidest things you can do.  There's the few million that The Happy Mondays were given to do an album and they pissed it all away partying in the Bahamas.

Then there's the £2 million advance given to Fischerspooner by Ministry Of Sound.  The band then pissed off and their second album still hasn't materialised 3 years on.

The record companies seem to have cottoned onto this now and have made moves to curve it.  Allegedly, Hope Of The States have been given a £1 million advance by Sony in the form of a sort of loan, whereby they have to earn Sony that amount before they get to keep it.

However, all of the above are a better way to spend money than the $30 million paid to Michael Jackson to make the abortion that was 'Invincible.'  I don't know if he's guilty of child abuse or not, and he made some incredible records pre-1990, but he deserves to go to prison for that monstrosity alone.

[Peking O]

Mariah Carey was paid in the region £38 million to get off Sony after the failure of her 'Glitter' album (which sold around 3 million copies). She then signed a $20 million, four album deal with Universal. During all this she left several bizarre messages on her own website, booked herself into a mental institute, divorced her husband (head of Sony Tommy Motolla), and appeared on MTV Cribs sitting in the bath in her clothes.

[Vermschneid Mehearties]

Toploader burnt out badly after their first album. Their second album had TV adverts, and pretty severe promotion, but didn't make the top 60...got to 74 I think, and we haven't seen them since. I find that funny as a fucking hated them, and people were saying how wonderful they were at the time.

The Mariah Carey story is always a classic.

[Goldentony]

TATU

sell good first record, samey second record with horrible shouty electro chorus, sell about 4 tickets to their shows at wembley, dissapear to a life of playing in store shows in japan

[Goldentony]

21st Century Girls

billed as the new spice girls who can actually play their own instruments, try to gain credibility by saying how much they love marc bolan, release their anthem, sells utter fuck all, do a national tour of school including mine where i saw them getting dressed in the heads office, no one even realises they have another single out, sell their story to the daily record blaming the spice girls rather than realising they were fucking rubbish

[GoochDogHigh5s]

Brinsley  Schwartz hired a plane to bring a lot of muso hacks to fly to see them in the states, cost the record company a hell of a lot of dosh.

I can't remember what happened, but the hacks got pissed off on the plane and they all gave BS bad reviews from which they never recovered

[Dr David V]

Robbie Williams - paid 86 million quid to make songs with videos which would normally be classed as porn. It mightn't be so bad, if it wasn't for that smug wanker's presence.

Oh, and of course there's Russell Crowe's musical career. Enough said.

[Utter Shit]

Mariah Carey was paid in the region £38 million to get off Sony after the failure of her 'Glitter' album (which sold around 3 million copies). She then signed a $20 million, four album deal with Universal. During all this she left several bizarre messages on her own website, booked herself into a mental institute, divorced her husband (head of Sony Tommy Motolla), and appeared on MTV Cribs sitting in the bath in her clothes.

I'd sit in a bath of my own afterbirth if someone paid me $58m for the stunt.

[JesusAndYourBush]

TATU

sell good first record, samey second record with horrible shouty electro chorus, sell about 4 tickets to their shows at wembley, dissapear to a life of playing in store shows in japan

It's even worse than that!  After their bad behaviour lost them a dead cert Eurovision win they went to Japan to do some TV appearances.  In one show they were seen in the opening part of the show but then disappeared and didn't do their interview or performance.  It turned out they wanted the whole show all to themselves and were a bit miffed that a music show should have other groups on it as well as them.  Their behaviour pissed off the Japanese and they went home to Russia shortly after in disgrace.  On another Japanese TV show that they'd been booked to appear on but didn't appear, they instead had two lookalikes of them and proceeded to rip the piss.

Back in Russia the girls are living in squalor.  They can't work because their still under their record contract which says that if they do any other work they have to give all their earnings to their evil svengali record producer (I forget his name, Ivan something).  I think one girl lives with her mum and I dunno about the other.

[Goldentony]

christ on a synthesizer, i didnt think it was that bad

[Peking O]

One of Tatu is pregnant as well, and allegedly wanted to have an abortion. When told that she would almost certainly not be able to have children again if she did so, she decided to go ahead and have the child. That's going to be a lovely story to tell the kid whe he/she grows up isn't it? Not exactly a 'funny' failure, but there you go...

[Goldentony]

i feel like a proper bastard now

[Lumiere]

TATU already went throug the exact same motions in RUSSIA as they did here.

Have a hit with the same song/video, act like lessers for a while to gain attention, then drop the act, then realise four people are actually interested in them, then stop altogether.

[Rev]

Not funny, but tragic:  the ace Disco Inferno were, so the story goes, forced to call it a day when their van was broken into outside the venue they were playing at that evening, and all of their equipment was lifted.  The insurance didn't cover it, and they were between record deals, so it was a case of just wandering off into the sunset.  A classic indie success story.

[Lumiere]

Not funny, but tragic:  the ace Disco Inferno were, so the story goes, forced to call it a day when their van was broken into outside the venue they were playing at that evening, and all of their equipment was lifted.  The insurance didn't cover it, and they were between record deals, so it was a case of just wandering off into the sunset.  A classic indie success story.

Sad but bitterly funny.

[dirkfunk]

how the hell do these people spend so much money recording an album
it only cost me around 450-500 earth pounds, with a great engineer
n all

[Lumiere]

It cost Jack White $5,000 (£3,000 roughly) to record Elephant. He used old recording equipment and the production on that album is a revelation.

[BetaKarraTene]

I don't think tATu (the prOPeR spelling) actually made a second record but I thought the first album was pretty good, and Life Thru A Lens and Sing When You're winning are fine records.

I'm going to regret saying that aren't I?

Then there's late-Britpop merchants Rialto who made a very good debut album which didn't sell and were later dropped by Mercury.  They then had a hit single which was self-financed and so Mercury decided to sign them again. After the second album failed to sell either, they were promptly dropped again by same said label.  This would be funny if the band weren't such nice blokes but ho hum.  Also, Space were hugely fucked about by their record label who wouldn't release their third album and were basically twats towards them, which is a shame considering they pretty much preceded the whole Liverpool 'scene' by a good 5 years and had some good records.

Another disaster is whatever happened to Morcheeba between their first album and the rest of their career.  (See also, Zero 7 and Faithless after Sunday 8am)

[Tom Pynchon's Photo]

One miserable afternoon back in 1989 I was walking through Blackpool town centre and saw four strange surfs with suicicde blonde hair sitting on a bench opposite The Tower. A few day later I saw them again sitting a few rows in front of me at the Birmingham NEC as I awaited REM to take the stage.

These four strange surfs were a band called Birdland, whom on their inception were heralded as the saviours of music,and about whom stories were told that record companies had to pay them just ot hear their demo tape. And unusally for a young band heralded as the saviours of music, they believed their own hype and used interviews to tell all how great they were.

Anyway

a few years later I bought a copy of the NME, looked at their letters page and saw an insertion from a member of Birdland informing all that they still existed, please come and see us play, we'd really appreciate it.
Whoever it was edited the letters page couldn't help but remark  that the same person who wrote the letter once said that  Birdland were the best band ever, like the fastest best looking train ever which you can't avoid coz we're so great.