A Quote by YG

In the record business, if you sign an artist that don't really know too much about the business, you can really get over on them in a lot of different ways, so it's a lot of people that don't give artist the game because they're trying to make the most money in the fastest way off their artists.
I think a business guy is different from an artist. They walk different paths. Artists create the best outputs when they're having fun. And when a good business partner supports them from the side, it creates great synergy. When someone's trying to do both, I think the music gets bad and the business gets bad, too.
Being an artist doesn't just mean you have a song. That doesn't make you an artist. The word 'artist' means so many different things, and I feel like to be a real one, you really have to do it all. The people that I think of as artists - Tyler the Creator, Childish Gambino, Kanye West - are doing the most.
I talked to people that I'd done theater with, older actors and stuff. There's a lot of people who go into the business, and they must think they're good, or they wouldn't be in it. Why do you think that you're good enough to go into the business and make money at it? So I really wanted to ask myself that question a lot. Because it was an important kind of thing that I was going to do. I really wanted to do it, I loved it, and I thought that I was good enough that I could make money at it. And that's really what it came down to.
It's never the same relationship. I see my job as filling in the blanks. Whatever it is that the artist lacks in the process of making a record, I'm supposed to fill that in. And sometimes it's a lot of stuff and I have to hector them about working on the material and that sort of thing. Sometimes you have an artist that's really fairly self-sufficient; they just need another ear to offer some objective criticism, but otherwise pretty much know what they're doing. It varies a lot.
If you do an indie film, where it's like, "We don't have a lot of money to give you, but we'll really give you a lot of freedom," that's really a luxury to have in this business. At least for myself, because I'm still kind of earning my acting credibility.
A lot of artists still will not get that far. And get that far and be as successful. So, it's a great thing for me, and hopefully I can make it to number 10. And then I would want to start managing other artists, 'cause I think the best manager is an artist, his, or herself, that has been in the business and been successful and knows the ins and outs of the business.
If 5000 people bought my record, I would appreciate those 5000 people. I make music for them because music isn't supposed to be so money driven. I didn't get into the music game because I wanted to make money. I sing because that's a God given talent of mine and it's something I love to do. If it's 10,000 or a million people, I'm going to give people the music they like from me. That's what being an artist is. Whoever likes your work, that's who you do it for.
A lot of people want to be an entrepreneur, so it's important to know that there's a lot of ways to be an entrepreneur. One of the ways is to go about and start your own business. There are also ways that you can gain experience in the context of a larger business, like raising your hand to helm a new office. As you are gaining your skills to run your own business successfully, the first way is to think about how you can do so based on where you already are.
Kill Rock Stars has a willingness to really work with the artist and to be flexible with what they're doing... part of being an independent artists means having your hands in the business all the time, so they bring in a lot of ideas about it.
You know, the record business is much different than being artist on stage.
A lot of artists are just really stupid about money, and it's really hard to find somebody who kind of thinks of shuffling money around and doing business as an art.
My dad has always just had a lot of faith in me as an artist and as a person, and he doesn't really dispense with a lot of advice when it comes to the music. He's taught me a lot over the years, but when I was taking on this project he's really hands-off about that. He just appreciates what I've done and is very supportive, and of course really proud.
Record companies don't think creatively about what something could possibly be because they are not filled with creative people. Nobody's looking at the future of music because they're concentrating so hard on what they can get from it right this second. It's really hard to see an artist; it's a lot easier to see money.
I'm extremely underleveraged. The report that said $650 - which, by the way, a lot of friends of mine that know my business say, boy, that's really not a lot of money. It's not a lot of money relative to what I had.
Producers are the people behind the biggest artists in the game. We definitely deserve that title to be considered as an artist, because producers don't get the recognition and the credit that they really deserve a lot of the time.
My record, Evolution, is really about me evolving as an artist and trying a few new things. There's a song called, Road Worn, which is about spending so much time on the road and is a lot more jazzy sounding than most of my other music.
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