A Quote by Kurt Elling

If I was going to sell out, I would do it for more than 10,000 records. — © Kurt Elling
If I was going to sell out, I would do it for more than 10,000 records.
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'm not the cool thing, and I'm not going to be the cool thing for a really long time, and it isn't like I'm not the cool thing and I sell 3,000,000 records every time. I'm not the cool thing, and I barely sell 150,000 records, if that, ever. So I'm obviously working really hard to sustain myself. I'm actually a target to be dropped, because that's just not enough records for a big company.
You can be in the Bay and sell 10,000 copies of independent records and make 50 grand and that's your job for the year. The shows you do off of that and them 10,000 sales is gonna feed you and your homies.
I'd rather sell 10,000 records that represent me than 2 million that don't represent me at all.
At the time I attempted to purchase the rights back for the 3 Homestead records, but the owner demanded an outrageous sum in the neighborhood of $10,000, about 10 times more money than I could get my hands on at the time.
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.
I've heard that Oasis or Coldplay will sell tickets, but they can't sell records. They sold out Madison Square Garden in three hours. And they can't sell albums. I don't know what's going on.
You know, punk bands now sell with one record - their first or second record - sell 10 times the amount of records than the Ramones did throughout their career with 20-something records. That's why I go over to Johnny Ramone's house and do yard work three times a week, just to absolve some of the guilt.
I have mixed feelings about Napster. I like what it can do for an unsigned band. It can help them sell 10,000 records. But for an established artist, there's already so much piracy around. They need to regulate it.
I've always felt that, when I looked at my tombstone, it shouldn't say, 'Mehmet Oz banged out 10,000 open-heart operations.' I've probably done 5,000. Am I any better at it than 10,000? He shook his head. It's just a different number on the tombstone.
Nobody's going to sell 10 million records by not working hard.
Obviously there was the idea that we could sell more records if we played live, but I guess I didn't care enough to sell more records to do that.
Anybody who comes together in a large group and they all believe the same thing, they're going to generate a certain amount of power. The Bible says one puts 1,000 in flight, and two 10,000, and so on and so forth. And so even if me and somebody else got into agreement about something, we would have more power than each of us by ourselves.
I've got a core audience, so regardless of what I put out, I can sell 100,000 records on an independent.
I make an embarrassing amount of money for a borderline Marxist, just by selling 100,000 records. I don't sell millions of records, and I don't need to.
The Creator would appear as endowed with a passion for stars, on the one hand, and for beetles on the other, for the simple reason that there are nearly 300,000 species of beetle known, and perhaps more, as compared with somewhat less than 9,000 species of birds and a little over 10,000 species of mammals.
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