They are slapping down recording costs, and they definitely less than in the nineties. However the marketing costs remain very high. I'm a full time music producer and have my own studio. That cut some of my out of pocket costs but the true cost of my album (it's eight songs) is probably $30-40k which I experience as opportunity cost (i.e. I'm not working on paying projects) and I stretched it over a couple of years. It's not a rational use of resource for me by any measure, I'm just obsessed. The cost of production can categorized in different ways; time, money, talent, effort. At a certain point one seems to reach a limit that can't be breached. Music is organized information, it takes a lot of fighting against entropy just to make it competent, never mind good. It's like some kind of law of information entropy dynamics! Seriously, if you compare any commercial release against the ocean of self produced music (like you find on MySpace)the amature stuff is not listenable and the commercial releases are, and they cost a lot.

I have to agree. Any other industry would be testing the waters and weeding out garbage more thoroughly instead of paying the insane costs for every band and then not paying any of them.

The thing is... The musicians allow this. They sign the contracts, even with these articles all over the internet. They knowingly step into this.

I think it's as sleezy as the next guy does, but until the musicians stop agreeing to it so freaking readily, there's not much the rest of us can do for them.