Elliott Smith Quotes

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

I don't really sell many records.

When I made my first album, there was no indication that anybody other than my parents were going to buy it.

My best country record only sold 200,000 copies.

My biggest frustration is the lack of scale in the music industry. The fact that no one has sold 100 million copies of an album is frustrating.

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

I don't know how many records I'm selling.

Bands that say they don't care about how their records sell are liars.

I know acts and I'm not going to name names but these people sold ten million copies the first time and the second album sells three million and it's considered a failure and they're dropped and that's really a shame.

I don't think the label cares about an album... People just want their number-one record.

Unless I've got Katy Perry on the cover of my CD, it's going to be tough to sell a lot of records.

I genuinely don't know how many albums I'm going to sell when the new album comes out, because I honestly don't know how many fans I've actually got at the moment.

But when our first album came out, I didn't think it was going to 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.

Even an independent label is looking for a hit, they're not looking for a record that's not gonna do well.

When I started playing music, people weren't selling 5 million records. That was not the standard; that was not the focus.

Raoul' sold a respectable 700,000 copies without a hit single. It didn't take off. If you don't sell 8 million albums or 4 million albums again, everybody deems it a big failure.

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.

If I cut an album now and sell it for ten bucks, I can put seven dollars and fifty cents in my pocket.

I feel like I'd like to continue putting out records and start putting them out more rapidly than I have until now and for me if I can keep selling the records to the fans that already like me that's fine.

Even though the popularity and the fanbase is much much greater, and more people have heard about me through things like the Grammys and the Ivors and touring and word of mouth, it doesn't reflect in the sales of the record and doesn't go into my pocket.

When radio stations started playing music the record companies started suing radio stations. They thought now that people could listen to music for free, who would want to buy a record in a record shop? But I think we all agree that radio stations are good stuff.

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.

The desire to hit a big home run is dominating the music business.