Rza Quotes

Nobody wants to make great albums now because nobody wants to buy them and there's no place to sell them.

More than half of all the hip hop record sales are white people, and I think that might be a result of my record helping people to accept hip hop.

It's a sad state when more people retweet than buy records.

J Cole went platinum with no features, and I wanna go platinum!

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.

Selling MP3s or physical copies, it's still cool, but I think it's slowly becoming outdated to where people just want to build a culture. The culture's what you're selling at this point.

In a time like this, when records are not selling, he's the only one that is selling. You know, Drake and all the other ones [did well], but Em did [close to] 800,000 his first week, and he's #1 for the fifth week. It's incredible. I think he has a faithful fan base of people who have been following him for years. They're not going to stop following him and not stop listening to his music. Em said he didn't like his last album as much as this one. You can hear the difference. I like both of the albums. '3 a.m.' is one of my joints. But Eminem has followers that's gonna mess with him until the day he dies.

People don't buy records anymore. I don't know how people can support themselves.

In the history of the hip hop world...there has been one, single, solitary human being in the history of the world. One female rapper to sell more albums than me in the first week.

I feel fortunate to have made records during an era where people actually bought music. But I have friends in struggling up-and-coming bands now that will certainly never be able to pay the rent, because music has been devalued.

I think the first thing that you need to detach yourself from is numbers, because music has now splintered off into so many different forms of media, MTV doesn't play videos, the radio is now competing with the Internet.

Rock and roll seems to have had a mellowing in the business where it got harder to sell individual records and make money doing that.

I mean, Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, I think the young kids sell lot of records. But for an older kind of artist, more of a sort of heritage, vintage type of artist, you have to think outside the box.

What's up, gangstas? It's the M-I-Double-Tizzle.

The thing about the state of hip-hop is that people are too concerned. I don't think that there's a problem with being too concerned about videogames, especially for me, because I'm not in the industry. I'm just a consumer. But hip-hop is constantly like, "What are you doing for the scene?"

They think that I was like Amy Grant, when actually no! The label went bankrupt and maybe sold a couple hundred records and that's about it. I was just trying different things.

I'm envious of the way that electronic dance music has organised itself. It has been able to understand what it ain't rather than what it is. And I think that slipped away from hip-hop as soon as the DJs lost the majority of the say so in the direction of the music.

I spent 80% of my time working on this, and 20% of my time working on music. Why do you think the song 'Niggas in Paris' is called 'Niggas in Paris?' 'Cause niggas was in Paris!

I think these days, as an artist, you have to be slightly entrepreneurial. ...Nobody really sells records anymore.

A lot of rappers want somebody to always sing on their records. If you can hold a note, they're gonna' ask you to come and be apart of their creativity. At that time, they were eager and on the streets selling drugs or in the studio making music. That was a big part of our lives were I grew up.

I just know that, right now, ... the biggest record selling business there is is rock and roll.

If you have a live reputation and your popularity is proven that way, then you're bound to get signed up because they see all those people buying those tickets and they think some of those people will buy those records, and that's what their business is primarily about.

I think that people have been claiming hip-hop as being dead since the moment it started. I think there are people - and I can be included in that category sometimes - that get frustrated feeling like maybe the industry has handcuffed itself, or trained its artists to do or think about music in a way that classically hasn't led to the greatest records in hip-hop.

If anybody can make a change it's the rappers.

The subscription model of buying music is bankrupt. I think you could make available the Second Coming in a subscription model and it might not be successful.