TobyMac Quotes

Americans work a long away ahead of themselves because of the size of the place. To make any impact at all you have to promote yourself with live performances ages before a release.

Traditionally the show must go on which is a stupid thing to say, but that in a nutshell is what's going on. We have a new record out; if we won't tour, the new record dies. It's reality - it's what business is nowadays. You just need to tour to sell your albums.

Traditionally, tours were a means of promoting a record. Today, the record promotes the tour.

I know if I don't tour people will forget the record and you run a high risk of the record failing.

If we waited for a hit record to tour, we would never have toured.

Records are very powerful promotional tools to go out and be able to play on the road, but you do have to think about it as a way of sustaining itself at some point.

The Band never really played big concert tours. We never sold millions and millions of albums.

When we were younger and first starting out in Australia, we found that we sold more records by word of mouth because we were playing the bars, clubs, and small places and building a following. And as we got bigger, we still relied a lot on word of mouth.

The touring business is obviously critical to selling records, building fan bases, selling T-shirts, fulfilling sponsorship commitments.

If you get half a million, at a certain stage you probably will get 4 million people, if they are able to hear it. The touring thing is unbelievable. It really is amazing from what we did the last tour even to what we are doing now.

I've always had just enough success to buy me some more tour dates and another record.

And you have a record company behind it, this is a key too, you need people to fight for your records, at least a little bit. So if you have a great song, it's catchy, and you've got a little bit of help, I think that's all you need. But there hasn't been that in music.

It used to be that you made an album and then you went on the road to promote that album, hoping for good record sales. Well, good record sales basically don't exist any more, and the emphasis has been more on the live show.

I enjoy touring. I enjoy recording the music, I enjoy dreaming it and I enjoy performing it. I also definitely enjoy selling it, because I like to eat.

Back in the day people made music to go on tour. They didn't make music to make a video.

Our first record, 'Huey Lewis And The News', was seen by no one - it sold 25 copies.

My records don't go platinum or gold. I think they go cedar.

If your album sells, that's cool, more people find out about you, more people get turned on to what we're really about-which is a live rock and roll band.

Being my own boss and working inside an industry that's not really an industry, I need to keep busy and keep working. The only way to make money in music - unless you're managing someone - is to tour, and even that depends on where you are at.

There's a big difference between doing the odd gig and actually having a record out and your name being on the ticket.

Any album that I ever put out I'm going to send it to country radio first.

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.

Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it's like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left.

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.

Our managers hadn't had that kind of success - the record company hadn't, we hadn't - and the feeling was that the next record had to be even bigger, and if it wasn't it would be some kind of failure.