I was once again gearing up to write about some interesting developments in the digital music business (as I've done numerous times before) but -- spoiler alert -- in the end it turned out that's not really where this is headed.

The news that grabbed me, specifically, was that DIY music hub Sellaband recently made some major changes to their service. Their site essentially gives bands the infrastructure needed to get their fans to invest in future recordings, sort of like buying them before they come out so there's money in the recording budget, but with some cool bells and whistles along the way (profit sharing of the proceeds with the investors, for example). The biggest change here is the removal of the $50,000 minimum the bands had to hit before cashing in. It has now been moved to $10,000, which seems to me to be a much more reasonable baseline. With professional studios getting walloped these days by the impressive dollar-to-performance ratio of prosumer equipment (and, yes, that pesky economy thing everyone keeps carrying on about), budgets for even large-scale productions are dropping dramatically.

Public Enemy is the most recent big-time band to go indie, a phenomenon which I think people have (astonishingly) already stopped paying attention to for the most part (this conclusion largely because I heard nary a peep out of anyone when Counting Crows kicked their label to the curb a few months back). The twist -- and there must be a twist, else nobody will pay attention, as the Crows had to learn the hard way -- is that P.E. is doing it via Sellaband.

This time, however, the piñata threshold is set at a $250,000 collective whack. This is, of course, unnecessary on several levels.

The first problem is that it's clearly just a publicity ploy, since there's no way these icons could actually be so strapped for cash that they'd need to preemptively milk it from their fans. (Not without gross mismanagement, at least, though you won't have to try too hard to convince me that Flava Flav may have pissed away his fortunes on clocks and women.)

The second -- and please, let's just squash the accusations of rockism at the outselt -- is that I have trouble envisioning why it would cost that much to record an album's worth of hip hop, which is inherently cheaper to record than anything involving a drum set, and doubly so if you're willing to swallow your pride and get your 808 kicks from Kontakt. (Caveats to this include that you might be also covering some marketing costs, they might be buying beats from expensive big-name producers, etc.)

But here's where I went wrong with that last part: I made that calculation from the perspective of a DIY musician, which I am, and which these guys are apparently not, DIY financing approach notwithstanding. Thus, that quarter-mil budget -- though still excessive, possibly -- comes from paying through the nose for every second of potentially productive studio time with expensive expert engineers in high-dollar studio rooms. They're paying for the clock to tick while they think creatively, and even Flav's ample stash can't help get that under control. I just realized that's a calculation I've never had to make, and probably never will.

For obvious reasons, most readers here can record themselves, so if you're reading this, congratulations -- you have already figured out the financing problem Sellaband is trying to solve. $10k, if that, should more than cover your record. Should you be so lucky, you can spend the other $240k on a house to make it in.