A Quote by Betty Wright
You gotta' sell a million records before you talk about getting paid at a major [label].
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There are a lot of musicians who are still desperately trying to pretend that it's 1998 and by having a huge marketing campaign, they somehow believe that they can sell 10 million records. That's delusional. No one sells 10 million records. The days of musicians getting rich off of selling records are done.
As a pro, in the beginning, I had to sell tickets to get paid. So you gotta be a hustler, and you gotta worry about fighting.
I don't sell millions of records. As a matter of fact, I'm not even interested in selling millions of records. I enjoy MCing. I make a decent amount of money. I can feed my kids. I keep a roof over my head. I don't have to sell a million records to maintain my lifestyle.
It breaks my heart to see these young, really talented bands getting chewed up into the system. I remember a time if you'd signed to a major label it was such a sell out! But now... unless you've signed to a big label, you're a failure now.
Remember the Stax label and how if you liked one record, you liked all the others as well? You don't talk to a lot of people who tell you how much they love their record label. I don't care how many records they sell.
I had every major label in the world - I mean, any label that dealt with rap music wanted to sign me. I ended up going with Jive Records because I liked everything about 'em.
You would think that anyone on a major label would be doing something, but when you speak of major label that means something to maybe a big pop star that might be getting some sort of benefit from the major. But we still don't get anything.
We wanted to do something different and have a surprise release. At first, naturally, the label was getting a little scared about that, because they wanna sell records, and a surprise release means it might not go as quickly.
I'm not trying to sound pretentious, but we did sell 12 million records on the first album, so we did get paid a little bit.
God works funny so it might have just been meant for me to be an artist that doesn't sell two million records. Maybe my records might change somebody's life rather than sell thru the roof.
Most artists are making as much money now as they could have made... in the heyday of Def Jam [when the] Beastie Boys would sell 10 million records or DMX would sell 6 or 7 million records. Those records are one thing, but then all the other ways to exploit the emotional relationship between artist and community is so much greater that I would guess that they're making as much or more money than they could have ever made.
I would sell 2 million records, a million went to teenagers and a million went to the adults. So, when The Beatles became so popular, I lost a million to the teenagers, but I was still selling a million to the adults.
I wanted to sell a million records, and I sold a million records. I wanted to go platinum; I went platinum. I've been working nonstop since I was 15. I don't even know how to chill out.
Nowadays, you have to sell, like, half a million or a million records just to break even.
I don't think, like, 'I've got to sell so many records here, or so many records there.' That's the record label's job. They've got to worry about how were doing in Kazakhstan or Germany. My job is just to write and sing.
The first two major label records I did what I wanted to do. It wasn't a problem until after I finished my part. They didn't understand I was an artist, a capable artist. When you're the money dealing with the talent, you need to let that talent develop, your job is to figure out how to sell it.
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