As some of us still dream of getting online access to a vast "Prince Vault", I wonder what the costs of mastering/remastering the tracks are.

I did use Google ( ), but answers vary greatly... So anybody in the know, what would be the costs of professionally pimping up the Vault material to a hi-res / CD-like sound quality that would be possible to stream/download?

For example, elsewhere I read that for Originals, 50 tracks had been (re-) mastered. What costs were involved in this?

It really does vary greatly, beginning from the specifics of the contract of each employer, the number of workhours, etc.

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An album whose masters are in pristine quality and all that is needed is a new scanning and boosting up on the clarity should be something that wouldn't take too long. A newly-recorded album may take some time as there needs to be an alignment of the songs' best takes to put on record, and it goes on the producers, sound engineers and musicians' hability and tastes on which sonic textures they'd like on their music.

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There are cases, for example, when doing stuff like putting out unreleased music that may not have been stored the right way, then there's also the work of restoring it closer to what it sounded when it was new. That is very labor intensive and takes a long time - especially if they're doing the individual music tracks (drums, bass, vocal #1, vocal #2, etc.)

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So I'm not sure if there's some sort of fixed value for payment for this, but mostly I'd say it depends on the gravity of the work.

these days it's probably different from years past, with technology and every wannabe producer out there. When I did my album I think I paid 300 for mixing and 500 for mastering but I am/was a small time indie musician. Things like that can cost into the millions.

Matthaus said:

It really does vary greatly, beginning from the specifics of the contract of each employer, the number of workhours, etc.

.

An album whose masters are in pristine quality and all that is needed is a new scanning and boosting up on the clarity should be something that wouldn't take too long. A newly-recorded album may take some time as there needs to be an alignment of the songs' best takes to put on record, and it goes on the producers, sound engineers and musicians' hability and tastes on which sonic textures they'd like on their music.

.

There are cases, for example, when doing stuff like putting out unreleased music that may not have been stored the right way, then there's also the work of restoring it closer to what it sounded when it was new. That is very labor intensive and takes a long time - especially if they're doing the individual music tracks (drums, bass, vocal #1, vocal #2, etc.)

.

So I'm not sure if there's some sort of fixed value for payment for this, but mostly I'd say it depends on the gravity of the work.

ya but you hear these crazy stories like how mj's final album costed in the millions, it depends on how much people want to obsess and fuck with every little thing. there are a couple stories, one from springsteen and another from Mj's people during the making of born to run and thriller, they got back some mastered albums and were devestated by how bad they sounded and then had to go through the whole process again, it can be painstaking. I've never been happy with how my own album was mixed, the mastering was good but the mixer did it all in 14 hours, not really long enough to do everything but no one knows anything about commitment these days.

I remember reading somewhere that the cost of transfering a cassette in Iron Mountain, for a retail release like P&M 83, is about 10-15k

Which isn't bad until you realize that they shipped 8,000 cassettes to IM

[Edited 8/22/19 3:57am]

RODSERLING said:

I don't know for the 80' s tracks. But If what they call remastering is too add so much reverb as they did with Originals, it s clearly throwing money through the windows. . I was particularly shocked with Love Thy Will be done, the sound on YouTube is better than on CD, especially the background vocals which are a pain in the ass to listen to on Originals. How can it be? . For most of the 90' s tracks, and the 2000 and 2010 s tracks, which were probably digitally recorded and protected from the start, that clearly doesn't cost a thing.

for my taste, all the auditory bells and whistles usually don't matter too much, i say usually because sometimes i'll hear something like Parade with more bass than i remember hearing in the 80's and I'll love it, but for the most part, for me, it doesn't matter that much. Some of the most legendary music of the past was made on basic equipement.