First question you should ask yourself: Why record an album in the first place?

This sounds like a simple and pretty useless question, but it's actually quite important. If you don't know what your goal is, you don't know how to plan for it. Here are a couple of examples of reasons to record an album:

Yearbook - Collegiate groups tend to record one album a year and it represents a year in the life of the group.

Turn an unpaid gig into a paying one - Sure, it sucks to play a show for free (or close to it). But if you've got a decent looking product to sell at the show, you can actually turn that frown upside-down.

Innovation - We may not make a lot of money, but we're going to do something that no one has ever done before in a cappella.

If you're planning on making a "yearbook" style album, then you need to figure that you may not sell to many of them. If you're going to sell just a few CDs, then it's probably not a great idea to throw tons of money into it unecessarily. No reason to splurge on replicating 2000 discs. No reason to go to a major mastering house to have your CD mastered. Knowing where you're going will help you plan a better route to get there.

If you answered "Just because" to the above question, that's not going to help you. You need to think about why you want to make a CD. Come up with a end-goal and you'll plan better and motivate your group better.

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