Classical musicians can be incredibly cheap when it comes to promotional photography.

I suggest to people that they should spend at least one gig fee each year on their pictures. They’re usually surprised that anybody should spend that much on a photographer. I wonder if the photographers think it’s a lot to pay somebody who just plays a bit of music.

Anyway, I could be dishing out bad advice. Here’s an outlier in the ratio of profit to photographic budget.

Celtic Woman is a new-agey vocal show propped up by an interminable series of PBS specials. The first of these albums was released in 2005. The last will be in stores in just over a week*. To date, they’ve sold more than 3 million units. That’s a whole warehouse full of CDs. You’ve got to hand it to them. They kept the branding consistent. They also left themselves room to fire any of the performers: the woman on the cover isn’t even in the band.

* I’m going to break with my usual habit of making the albums click-though to a music store. The titles are easy to spell. You can search for them yourself. Think of this inconvenient step as the blog equivalent of the cover over the button that launches the torpedoes. It’s a safety feature. You don’t want to listen to this stuff by accident.