Guns N' Roses spent over a decade and a reported $13M making Chinese Democracy

Axl Rose began recording Chinese Democracy in the early 1990s and kept working on it through a complete turnover of the band's lineup, missing a 1999 delivery deadline by nearly a decade. Geffen Records pulled the album from its release schedule in 2004 and cut its funding, stating that finishing and paying for the record was Rose's obligation, not the label's.

Best Buy became the album's exclusive U.S. retailer, prepaying UMG roughly $14M for 1.3 million copies with no right of return — a bet that the marathon production and built-up anticipation would translate into blockbuster sales. Estimates of the album's own production cost range from roughly $12M to $13M across contemporaneous reporting, a figure the band's own management later disputed as overstated.

The album debuted at number 3 on the Billboard 200 with 261,000 first-week U.S. copies, below expectations for a release with this much anticipation and cost, then dropped 78% in its second week to number 18. It went platinum in the U.S. and sold roughly 2.6 million copies worldwide by early 2009 — respectable in isolation, but far short of covering its combined production cost, marketing, and the guaranteed retail buy against the band's earlier albums, which had sold tens of millions.