Chris Stapleton Quotes

When people who are songwriters say 'That's my property and if you give it away for free then I'll lose my incentive,' then, well, good riddance.

Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it.

Once you put songs out, they're not yours anymore. They're everyone else's.

We look at the sharing of music as really, really important for our business.

As long as you have a percentage of a song, that lasts forever. You have to study the business. Don't just be in it for money. You have to understand what you're in it for, then get your money.

Even if I don't release it myself, somebody else might hear it and want to record it. When you write a song, it gives it that potential.

It's so funny because if you tweet your lyrics and then you hear it in a song next week, you're like, 'Hey I had that same idea.' I'm very secretive with my music. We have to send emails password protected. Because once that song gets out, you aren't selling that thing.

The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Barbra Streisand, Bruce Springsteen, these are just some of the people who threatened to sue if we used their songs.

It's hard for new artists to keep hold of what they own.

In the old days, people shared music; they didn't care who made it. A song would be owned by a village, and anyone could sing it, change the words, whatever. That is how humans treated music until the late 19th century. Now, with the Internet, we are going back to having tribal attitudes towards music.

I don't want to have to talk to a lawyer if I want to jam with someone or if I want to sing on someone's album.

I rarely have any contact with the artists who cover my songs.

Only I hold the right to all my songs.

Because I don't believe music can be free unless it has something to be free from.

There are a lot of people who really abused sampling and gave it a bad name, by just taking people's entire hit songs and rapping over them. It gave publishers license to get a little greedy.

Well I know I was contracted to Polydor so they couldn't use my name.

One of the reasons I started Tzadik, which is my own label, is to keep things in print. I got tired of labels dropping things out of print when they don't sell.

I have had the good fortune to experience both the limelight and the traffic light as a musician. I did my first recording on my own and it was available at concerts. The second to seventh were released on small and then large labels. My eighth to 14th were done under my own steam once again, but with the benefit of the Internet.

I would never put my songs in a commercial.

It's a songwriter's dream to have a song recorded and run up the charts.

I'm overly excited to finally announce this amazing global partnership deal back home with EMI Music. I know I have mentioned doing music in the past but for legal reasons I was not in a position to release any new music.

The record company stay out of my way. Whenever the record is finished, they take it.

I certainly don't want to be a record label guy.

Sheet music, recording, radio, television, cassettes, CD burners, and file sharing have all invalidated, to some extent, the old model of making a living making music.

Publishing the lyric books, poetry or comics of other musicians I know. That's the thing I really want to break into!