M.I.A. Quotes

If you're on an indie label, you're not getting enough money. And if you're on a major, you're not getting enough support.

A lot of very popular mainstream artists are products of record companies and marketing companies, and any time anyone can stand outside of that, that's interesting.

The worst part is that if you become part of a major - all these independent labels become farm teams for your corporate parent. Basically, you do all the work for years, blowing up an artist - you discover them, blow them up, you build their fan base. And then that artist is like, "Okay, now I'm here. Now I want more. I want to be bigger." And you're either going to be able to accommodate them, you're going to be able to figure out how to take that step with them, or you're going to lose them.

I think the big studios shaped and formed the artists that they put under contract.

There are certainly things labels can still provide that indie artists can't. They can pave the way to radio and pay big bucks for promotion.

We've managed to have a long career that is still quite vibrant, yet we've never had to kow-tow to record companies who said we weren't commercial enough.

I know there are some labels that put out music for art's sake, but I don't know which ones.

There are people who are genetically made to start record labels, and I'm not one of those people. People just have it in their blood and are good at it. Corey Rusk from Touch and Go and Ian MacKaye. These are people who have made their own labels.

I wanted to put out a solo record because I was stuck on a major label and sick of it.

I truly believe, as an institution, most major labels should just die.

If it wasn't for the TLC story, many artists would not have smartened up, and you wouldn't have the Lil Waynes and people with their own labels.

I remember talking with Arcade Fire after their first record, when they were getting all kinds of offers from major labels, and I don't think I gave them any advice. They survived that whole onslaught pretty well anyway without me.

I was always looking to record, but how much I actually pursued it was another thing. The major labels weren't that interested in me, and the smaller labels didn't have any money to do anything.

Equal Vision seems to be doing really well. A lot of these major labels are just imploding and becoming indie labels, anyway.

I built a reputation as a songwriter in the industry before my own hits. People were used to coming to me for songs. There were songs like 'Clown' and 'Mountains' that were my songs that I wanted to keep. But the record labels saw me as a songwriter. It was hard to get people to believe in me as an artist.

Artists were nurtured back in the '70s. Their music was developed by the record companies.

I now believe that major labels can only work with people who care more about fame and money than the quality of the art they produce.

I didn't expect major labels would embrace MySpace, and the original idea for music on the site was the unsigned bands, the independent bands.

I'm sad for younger bands that don't have a home that they know they can go to, like the twenty-five labels that used to be around that they know they can hang their hat and know that they'll give 'em three, four, five albums to develop.

If there's any profit to be had in Nashville-Underground, it's very long term. We're not about money, which gives us an edge over the labels.

There are just as many dirt bags in independent music as there are in major labels.

Major labels have always been around our band since the beginning, and we just waited. We knew we had to do some things, and we needed to grow as a band before we made that step. We needed to do it our way and not do it how it works for other people.

I was fortunate enough to have gone through the major label process and kind of have the inside scoop on some things, some information I wouldn't have normally had. To go from a major to an independent, I don't think it's an easy transition.

One of the central flaws in the state of contemporary music is that the major record companies have failed to incorporate that simple fact into their business plans. They've come into an industry that's based on idiosyncratic artists and tried to erase every idiosyncratic aspect out of it.

Major labels just lost their way. It's like the housing bubble. They lost a sense of the fundamentals.