10 Most Expensive Albums Of All Time

5. Def Leppard €“ Hysteria

Total Cost: $5,000,000 At the time of its release, Def Leppard's 1987 record Hysteria was one of the longest albums ever issued on a single vinyl record, lasting a whopping sixty-two and a half minutes. It's also the band's best-selling album to date, shifting twenty-five million copies worldwide. Which is rather fortunate, given the extremely high cost of making it. That's not to mention the sheer amount of time and work that was spent on it too, with four years elapsing between Hysteria's release and the band's previous album Pyromania, released in 1983. As is often the case, the cost of the album was down to a string of lengthy delays. Originally, the album was to be produced by Robert Lange, but he dropped out due to exhaustion. It was then that Meat Loaf's primary songwriter Jim Steinman was brought in, but his vision for the record's sound did not match up with the band's, and they ended up parting ways. After that, Def Leppard's drummer Rick Allen lost his left arm in a motor-vehicle accident. He committed to returning to the band despite this disability, but it took time for him to master his custom drum kit. Around this time Robert Lange returned as producer, but there were further delays following Lange's own motor-vehicle accident. What this ultimately amounted to was a cost of almost five million dollars, a crazy amount of money for an album released in 1987.
 
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Commonly found reading, sitting firmly in a seat at the cinema (bottle of water and a Freddo bar, please) or listening to the Mountain Goats.