The #UndergroundArtist hashtag has been having a moment on TikTok, lots of artists posting about the hustle, the grind, the romanticism of doing it yourself. And I love that content, genuinely. But I keep noticing that it stays pretty surface-level on the money part. We talk about passion and persistence and believing in yourself. We don't talk about the actual numbers, which is a problem, because passion doesn't pay for mastering.
HEATHEN HYMNS is out now. It's real. People are finding it and sending me messages that I can't always respond to without crying a little, which is a new and alarming development for someone who spent years being very practiced at being unbothered. But HEATHEN HYMNS existing in the world is the result of a significant amount of money spent, and I want to talk about that plainly because indie artists who hide the economics do a disservice to the artists coming up behind them.
This is what underground art actually costs. Your numbers may vary. Mine looked like this.
Recording: The Biggest Variable
I do a lot of my own production in my apartment studio. The closet-turned-recording-space that has exactly enough room for a chair, an interface, my monitors, Sunday the acoustic, and one hanging plant hook that currently holds a small succulent I have not yet named or killed. This setup took time to build and represents maybe $2,000 to $3,000 in equipment accumulated over several years. Most of it was bought secondhand. None of it is fancy. All of it works.
But there are things home studios can't fully do. Drum tracking, for one. Live room ambience. The kind of acoustics that come from actual physical space and not software processing. For HEATHEN HYMNS, the tracks that needed live drums or orchestral elements (and there are a few) went into a proper studio for a day or two. Studio rates in my city run between $50 and $150 an hour depending on the room, the gear, the engineer's experience. Two full studio days, conservatively: $1,200 to $2,000, not including any session musician fees.
Session musicians are their own line item. A union-rate session musician in a major market runs roughly $500 to $600 for a three-hour session. I'm not in a major market, and I called in some favors and bartered (produced a few beats for a drummer I know), so my actual costs were lower. But it's important for people to know what it's supposed to cost, so they don't accidentally exploit musicians by normalizing the "exposure" economy. Pay musicians. That's non-negotiable.
Mixing and Mastering: The Part Nobody Budgets For
This is where a lot of indie projects fall apart financially. Not because the artist overspent on recording, but because they didn't budget enough runway for what comes after. You've got your recorded tracks. Now what?
Mixing is the process of taking all those recorded elements and making them live together. Levels, EQ, compression, space, dynamics. It's a craft that takes years to develop, and while there are more accessible tools now than there were five years ago, a genuinely great mix on a genuinely complex project requires either your own deep expertise or someone else's. Professional mixing for an album: $500 to $3,000 depending on the mixer and the complexity. For HEATHEN HYMNS I did my own mixing on most tracks because I've been learning it for years and I had to, economically. Two tracks got professional mixing attention because I kept getting them wrong.
Mastering is the final step, getting the tracks to translate well across streaming platforms, to have consistent volume and frequency treatment, to sound like an album rather than thirteen separate recordings. Mastering per track from a reputable engineer: $50 to $200. For thirteen tracks, you're looking at $650 to $2,600. There are online mastering services that do it for much less, and some of them are actually quite good, but the quality range is huge and you don't always know what you're getting.
Total recording, mixing, and mastering budget for an indie album if you're being realistic and not doing much yourself: $4,000 to $10,000 minimum. More if you're using outside studios and professional session musicians for everything. HEATHEN HYMNS came in well under that because of my own skills and barter. But it still cost real money, and it still cost years of accumulated equipment investment before I could do what I do.
Art, Design, and Rollout
Cover art. Physical and digital assets for singles, for social, for the album itself. A music video or lyric video or even just a quality photo shoot. These are not optional if you want to be taken seriously, and they cost money.
I did the art direction for HEATHEN HYMNS myself (the visual language is something I've been building for a while) but I worked with a graphic designer on the final execution. That relationship cost real money and was worth every cent. Good design for an album release including cover, single covers, and basic social templates: $500 to $2,000 depending on who you work with.
Photography: if you're going to be an artist with an online presence, you need actual good photos. Not your friend's iPhone in decent lighting, not a selfie with a ring light. Real photos. I've done photo shoots that ranged from $200 for a talented photographer who was building their portfolio to $800 for someone with a more established rate. Budget $500 minimum for a decent release-era shoot.
Paid promotion on social platforms. You can grow organically and some people do. But if you're releasing an album and you want people outside your existing audience to find it, ads are part of the toolkit. A small targeted campaign: $200 to $500 for meaningful reach. More if you're trying to break into a new market.
Distribution, Licensing, and the Streaming Math
Getting your music onto Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, etc. costs either a flat annual fee (DistroKid charges around $20 to $25 a year, TuneCore charges more but offers different splits) or a percentage of your royalties. The flat-fee model is almost always better if you're releasing regularly.
Here's the streaming math that everyone should know: Spotify pays artists approximately $0.003 to $0.005 per stream. That's fractions of a cent. To earn $1,000 from Spotify streams alone, you need roughly 250,000 streams. A million streams (which is a genuinely significant accomplishment for an indie artist) nets you somewhere around $3,500 to $5,000. Before your distributor takes their cut.
This is why the $6.66/month membership model (or any direct support model) matters so much. One person paying $6.66 a month is worth roughly 1,300 Spotify streams. Every month. Direct support from fans is not supplemental to streaming income for indie artists. it's often what actually makes the rent possible. It's why I'll always be grateful and specific about it: the people who choose to support directly are literally keeping this alive in a way that the streaming economy structurally cannot.
Why This Math Matters
I'm not sharing this to complain, and I'm genuinely not trying to guilt anyone into anything. I'm sharing it because the romantic "underground artist" narrative sometimes obscures a structural reality that keeps talented people from even trying, or keeps them trying in unsustainable ways that burn them out before they get to make the thing they're meant to make.
The economics of indie music are genuinely brutal and I'd be lying if I told you otherwise. The streaming model extracts enormous value from artists and redistributes very little of it back. The equipment and professional services required to compete for ears are expensive. The marketing infrastructure that connects music to listeners costs money that most indie artists don't have.
And yet, and this is also true, and I hold both things: it has never been more possible to make and release genuinely good music independently. The tools that cost thousands of dollars in 1995 are now affordable or free. Direct-to-fan distribution exists. Communities of independent artists trade knowledge and resources. There are paths through the maze.
The people who navigate those paths most successfully are the ones who understand the economics clearly, not the ones with the most romanticism about the struggle. Know what it costs. Build a real plan. Ask for support when you need it and be specific about why. Your music is worth the honest conversation.
HEATHEN HYMNS exists because of a lot of money and a lot of time and a lot of help, some of it paid and some of it bartered and some of it given freely by people who believed in the thing before it was a thing. I don't take that lightly. Not for one second.
What Sustainable Actually Looks Like
I want to end with something practical rather than just the economics of making the thing, because a lot of underground artists talk about what it costs to make music and not enough about what makes it sustainable to keep making it. And those are different questions.
Sustainability for me looks like: multiple revenue streams, none of which I'm dependent on entirely. Streaming income (small but real). Direct support through memberships. Merch that I price honestly rather than at the margin. Sync licensing opportunities, which are real and accessible for indie artists through platforms that didn't exist five years ago. Getting a song placed in a TV show, a YouTube creator's video, a podcast intro is meaningful income and also meaningful discovery for new listeners. Live shows, which I'm building back toward. And the blog and social content, which support all of the above by keeping the community engaged and giving people reasons to stay connected between releases.
None of this is passive. All of it requires consistent attention. The "passive income from streaming" dream is just that for almost everyone below a certain scale. But the combination of active revenue streams, built deliberately over time, can get to a place where the art isn't subsidizing itself entirely from personal savings and the universe's goodwill.
If you're an indie artist reading this and you're trying to figure out the money: start with the honest accounting. Know your actual costs. Know what you make from each source. Find the gaps. Ask for support specifically rather than generally. "I'm trying to cover mastering costs for the next record" is a clearer ask than "support my art." People respond to specificity because it makes them feel like their contribution has a real destination. And then keep making the work, because the work is what all of the money is for in the first place.