Mike Will Made It Quotes

My first love was basketball, but that wasn't gonna launch me, and I knew I had to get into other things. So me and my friends, we started making mix CDs and going down to South Beach or to the parking lot at Pitbull concerts to spend all night hustling.

My passion is music, you know, and music influences culture, influences lifestyle, which leads me to 'Roc-A-Wear'. I was forced to be an entrepreneur, so that led me to be CEO of 'Roc-A-Fella' records, which lead to Def Jam.

Back in the '90s, if you did mail order in music, you could make a good living doing it if you could hustle.

I'm gonna be making records anyway, even if I had to sell 'em out of the trunk of my car. I'm that kind of musician and singer.

So So Def has been one of the most successful and consistent labels in the game in the last 10 years.

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'm just focusing on 'Let's Stay Together' and slowly building my production company. I'm trying to get into writing as well.

It's like half the campaign of selling a record is trying to convince people that you're an artist. Well, I am an artist. This is what I do.

I've been part of running a label since I was a kid, so I understand how it works. But the more and more I learn about it, the less and less interested I am in it.

I started my own record label.

I will be developing artists for my new label. The rest is in God's Hands.

It's definitely been a long, long... long, long, long, long, long journey since I was selling burnt CD's out of my backpack in downtown Oakland.

You don't need a record company to turn you into anything.

Ever since I was a little kid, I wanted to start a record label.

I just wanted to have my own dynasty. I wanted my own Cash Money or Roc-A-Fella. Outside of that, I also wanted my own media company.

I have my own label and I'm my first artist.

Hip hop is a multi-billion dollar business, and it was built off an opportunity that nobody else saw because they didn't understand the culture.

A lot of young producers will stay at home and make beats all day but making beats is only about 20 percent of the job. The other 80 percent is networking; that's what I feel like a lot of people are lacking.

When I was cutting hair, I felt like that was my trap. I started selling haircuts. I started selling beats; that's me trapping. So trap music is like hustling music to me.

I don't do albums for album sales. I just do it as a conversation piece and a business card.

Success came to me in my late 20s. I started touring when I was a teenager, so I had already seen the good, the bad, and the ugly side of the music business. Plus, setting up my own record company taught me a lot.

I'm just an artist that makes good music and has a good idea to make money off of that.

I don't really know the logistics of a Soundcloud rapper.

I started gravitating towards Soundcloud. So, that was my hustle and then I met my manager Justin in 2012 and we were just grinding it out in New York.

Starting my own label was more out of necessity. I'm not going to sit around and wait for labels to come screaming.