10 Most Expensive Rock Albums Ever Made
Utterly insane amounts of money were spent to get these albums out of the studio and onto shelves.
Making a major rock album isn't easy, nor is it usually cheap.
There are studio costs to consider, as well as the fees for engineers, mixers, and session musicians. Plus there are certain... lifestyle costs... associated with being a rock star.
You can make your own assumptions there.
According to one source from 2021, the expected cost of producing an album is anywhere between $6,000 and $30,000, depending on the quality and the scope of the project. The following ten artists looked at those figures and laughed.
Unfortunately, due to a lack of transparency from record companies, the exact cost of these albums is unknown. The figures stated are rough estimates, gathered from various sources online.
The first two entries on this list were, at the time, considered the most expensive albums ever made. Their base figures don't seem too bad today, but once adjusted for inflation, they skyrocket.
As for the other eight, they all cost at least $1 million to make. And that's without inflation.
These astronomical figures were the result of numerous setbacks or oversights during the recording process, all of which led to these albums racking up enormous bills.
10. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band - The Beatles (£25,000 In 1967)
Whilst it would still make a lot of people contemplate selling their own grandmother to the local zoo, £25,000 is not a huge amount of money by modern standards.
Rewind the clock to the mid-60s however, and it's a very different story.
Between 1966 and 1967, The Beatles recorded one of the greatest albums ever made. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was the end result of years of experimenting (with music and with drugs) and was what confirmed the Fab Four's legacy as one of the most important musical groups of all time.
Sadly for their accountants, innovation didn't come cheap.
The iconic cover itself cost £3,000, which was about 60 times what was spent on the average piece of art. The album's final cost was somewhere in the region of £25,000, making it one of the most expensive albums ever made at the time.
In contrast, The Beatles' first album four years earlier had cost just £400 to make.
In today's money, Sgt. Pepper cost around £378,000, or $495,000. Honestly, it could have cost ten times more and it still would have been worth every single penny.