A Quote by Yasmine Hamdan
I went from the most underground band in the world to signing with Madonna's producer and a record label that is extremely mainstream - it was interesting.
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I do not want and will not take a royalty on any record I record. I think paying a royalty to a producer or engineer is ethically indefensible. The band write the songs. The band play the music. It's the band's fans who buy the records. The band is responsible for whether it's a great record or a horrible record. Royalties belong to the band. I would like to be paid like a plumber. I do the job and you pay me what it's worth.
I hold the record for signing the most boobs in my band.
We're not really an underground band anymore, and we're not a mainstream band, either.
I love the way I make hip-hop and I refuse to make pop-rap. I don't refuse to make mainstream music, which is why I did a soul record. There was no reason why soul music couldn't get played on the radio and I still wanted to have a relationship with my record label. So, I really enjoyed doing the Strickland Banks album. But there's no point in my trying to release underground hip-hop music on a major label. That part of my talent, or part of my art, had to live somewhere else and feature film was the perfect vehicle for it.
Signing to a major label was an experiment for us. It was a challenge: working in a big studio with a producer was a challenge in a lot of ways. It all shaped what the band went on to become through the '90s. After we made 'Goo,' we went out and toured with Neil Young in ice hockey arenas for three months, and that was the same kind of thing.
You gotta look beyond the mainstream... the mainstream'll drown you, you know? There's always a pulse in the underground that I love. And the pulse in the underground is what keeps heavy metal alive.
The underground always has the best ideas. Sometimes those underground artists transcend and make it to the mainstream, but most of the time, the big guys just steal from us.
A producer gets the whole vision done from top to bottom, to making the record to having the record delivered to the world. That's a producer.
So, I play in a band. It's a really underground band. Super underground. Very underground. Like, we don't even actually play.
Commercial success still hasn't come to an artist that isn't signed to a record label. There are very few artists that can succeed without the help of a record label. The role of the record label is still required, it's still necessary.
We've always been kind of an underground band in a way that had the respect of our peers on the road. I like to say we're the world's most famous opening act because we've opened for every huge band on the planet.
It was three breakups going on at the same time. It was breaking up with my band, and my boyfriend, and right after that, my record label. I was arguing a lot with my record label during that whole time, so maybe they all affected each other. This record, Mondo Amore, came out of a time that was really heartbreaking and confusing, and that's why I switched the sound up a lot, to make it sound a little bit grittier and more raw.
You know, if a band on a label sold a few hundred thousand copies of their record these days, they wouldn't make any money. But if a band can pump out 10 million copies of a record for free, and 50,000 of those fans come to the band's website to watch pay-per-view videos or buy a t-shirt, that's roughly $10 million in revenue per year.
Commercial record has never interested me. It's amazing I was in a band like The Police that had such phenomenal commercial success. Part of what made The Police what it was was that we didn't all come in with obvious mainstream musical tastes. We were a rock band and somehow we had to make rock music, but it was informed by a lot of things outside of the mainstream for sure.
I realized how important it was to have a good team - manager, attorney and label. It's not just about putting out a record and somebody signing you.
There's always going to be a fight between mainstream and underground because the mainstream is a very small bubble, and the underground scene is a very small bubble, and they both see themselves as secret societies.
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