A Quote by Nat King Cole
I'm a businessman. I work for business people. The kind of thing they say is: Now we've sold a lot of records, let's sell some more.
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I'm a businessman. Making records is my business. I have a big operation and I employ a lot of people.
A lot of people kind of perceive me as some kind of pop act because in the early '80s 'I Love A Rainy Night' went No. 1 for two weeks in a row and 'Driving My Life Away' sold a million records.
Wynton told us that Miles sold out, just wanted to make more money, just wanted to sell more records. I don't believe that Miles sold out but I'm not in a position to say.
I wanted to get my recording and become a musician again, work; with other people, do that kind of thing because I kind of got away from that for a while once we started happening, you know, selling records, sold out concerts.
We live in an age of music for people who don't like music. The record industry discovered some time ago that there aren't that many people who actually like music. For a lot of people, music's annoying, or at the very least they don't need it. They discovered if they could sell music to a lot of those people, they could sell a lot more records.
After a while, you want to sell a lot of records, win awards and touch as many people as you can, but you have to secure the foundation with your family. I'm a family man, but I'm a businessman, too.
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'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.
It's a strange thing, this idea that for some reason, if a lot of people like what you're doing, it's therefore not very good. We use the phrase that a band have 'sold out.' Just so you know, if you're doing a gig and you sell all your tickets, that is a brilliant thing to do.
I cleaned up my act, and I made this rap thing work for me. I thought people would respect me for that. But instead, it's, 'Oh, he's sold all these records, and now he thinks he's all that.'
For the longest time, I was just playing music and not really expecting any success - just kind of doing it because I liked doing it. While doing that, I went on a lot of shitty tours, playing to nobody, so I think it makes me appreciate it. Our band the New Pornographers have been popular for a few years now, but it still shocks me. I remember thinking we were hugely popular when we sold 15,000 records, and now this one sold 30,000 in two weeks. I'm grateful for the whole thing.
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.
There is a kind of a cascading chain, ... If one can't sell, then that business doesn't buy and that means the next business doesn't sell, and the previous business doesn't sell, and so on.
If by day art is in the service of business, the evenings are devoted to the businessman's enjoyment of it. That is asking a lot of art, but art and the businessman make it work.
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.
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.
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