George Duke Quotes

I've never believed in cheapening music by going according to what some people think is public taste.

Roadrunner wanted to make Born in the Flood the next Nickelback, but I didn't want to be that. I didn't want to be a huge rock star playing songs I didn't like. I didn't want to be stuck playing 'Anthem,' the song everybody liked but I didn't want to put on the record, for the next five years.

I would rather fall flat on my face than try to just make a quick dollar by making music that fits into the radio format right now. It does nothing for me.

In the music industry, we value large success. I realized that while I would like that, that it's not what my writing is about. And if I start making it about that, it becomes impure.

Any band that is out there chasing it is doing more destruction to music then someone who is out there playing what they truly feel.

I am in a business that's built on record sales and reputation and how your single is doing and where your song is on iTunes. But the kind of music that I do comes from my beliefs.

I'm just not interested in selling out to get on the charts and make people happy.

Ain't nobody making music to not be heard and the easiest way to be heard is to be on the radio, but you should never compromise who you are, your values or your morals.

In my opinion, some of the hip-hop records that come out, people are willing to compromise. I'm not.

Of course, you're not making records in a vacuum. I'm not making them for myself. It would be nice if I could get more people to hear them. But if I have to sell my soul to the devil to do it, I won't.

When no one's buying your records, it's easy to justify selling a song. But once you start selling records, you can't really justify having two songs in Cadillac commercials. It looks greedy. And it is greedy. This whole music thing should be about music.

I'm making music that I love and I want to hear. At the same time, things like making money, making crazy money - you gotta find ways to reach to everybody but uplift everybody.

I want to make music that I like; not something that I have to make because I think it's going to sell.

I'm not saying I wasn't flawed or amateurish. But you can never say I did anything to appease the music business.

A lot of people these days are not music lovers - they just want to be famous which is a very different thing to what I grew up believing in.

You have to be tough-skinned and willing to accept criticism, and at the same time, just try to do music that you like and you are proud of and not just whatever you think it's going to take to get you on the radio.

I'm not trying to stay in the same place and I'm not trying to compete with what's currently in fashion. That would be dishonest. But, at the same time, I'm different and the music reflects that to some degree.

I am very aware now that music is a business, but there is also a way to go about making music that is true to yourself as opposed to doing, you know, just going through the motions and making things that would just be commercially successful.

The artists in country music who stopped having hits are the ones who were led into something that wasn't them.

It's one thing to be a fan and it's another thing to be a label.

I feel that recording a song already compromises the magical music one can create in the mind, so the fewer people watering down this process the better.

I don't need a sensationalized headline to sell music or to bring attention to my music. It's the music and it's always been about the music.

All the music that I've made in the past I've believed in. I think some of it has been more commercially successful than others, but it wasn't premeditated.

My responsibility is to the artist first. There's something that artists intrinsically know about their music and their fanbase that neither the record company nor the producer really knows.

We went into that knowing that we were never going to sell a major record 'cause we didn't sound like these bands, so I just thought this was an opportunity for us to make the kind of records that we wanted and make some money at the same time.