Adam Schlesinger Quotes

I like bands that don't necessarily sell the most records.

Our music is weird. It's not pop. I don't know why so many people buy our records.

The record business has always mystified me. Sometimes there are reasons why things sell or don't sell that can't be understood by mere mortals.

I mean Iggy and The Stooges first couple of albums I think sold twenty five thousand between the two of them you know and so to talk in terms of an underground I mean you have to go really to the independent labels and things like that.

I guess I've been making records since I was 16, and even when 50 people bought them, I thought that was amazing.

Well, a lot of our concerts do okay, and I know we still get royalty checks which still isn't that important, but again, I have to just say that we're making our records.

I actually don't think that I'm gonna sell a lot of records.

The record companies are interested in the kind of sales they can get from the rock groups.

We were at Pye Studios for half an hour so we set the gear up and we did two tracks. A month later we found out it was selling thirty thousand copies a day.

I don't think they like the idea that the people who are buying the record get to choose what goes out, because it's their job. The fans even pre-ordered stock to make sure that I had some sort of presence.

Well, you know, back then there wasn't many albums, it was the singles. You sold singles.

MTV made a huge impact. Heavy rotation took you from selling 1m albums to 20m albums, and that meant a lot of dough.

My real life helped me sell a lot of records.

It doesn't matter how good you are as a band or how good your music may be; if the fans aren't supporting it and buying your music, it's hard to make it.

Well, the album 'Intuition' is out and just went platinum officially. So I think to have the music doing what it's doing right now, man, it's the ultimate. Nobody is really selling records out there but we are at a million records and we dropped it at Christmas, so we are just trying to get that thing to like two million, you know.

There's something extraordinary about selling millions and millions of albums.

If I had to live on record sales, I'd be pushing up the daisies.

I love that with a lot of my favorite records, I couldn't tell you the sales on them, like Scarface or some of the UGK albums.

Pantera is a marquee band, with the most diehard fans. We sold over 20 million records without MTV or radio.

I think we'd sold a couple hundred records with our first album, maybe 1,000 at the most.

It seemed record companies wanted bands to be creative because they didn't know how to manufacture underground music. We could do our own thing and go at our own pace. But that changed when major labels started wanting bands that would sell 7 million records.

It's harder and harder to sell records now. You've got to give extra value. You've got to give people a reason to go out and buy it rather than burn a friend's copy.

From all the years that I've been in the business, you know that ballads are what impact. Mid-tempos are great, you can sell some records on 'em, but when it comes down to it, ballads are the meat-and-potatoes on the album.

To have a No. 1 with 130,000 copies sold is, you know, I remember when we first started selling records, in order to have a No. 1, you'd have to sell at least a half a million if not more, for the rock side of things.

I did a double CD, 'The Element of Surprise,' in 1998. That album went gold.