Dan Hicks Quotes

I was with PolyGram; that was the big label that I was with for the longest, like 12 years.

You rarely get money out of labels, except for when they open up a budget for a project. Other than that, it's a do-or-die type thing.

We are meeting with Sony, and we have a couple of other labels that suddenly have interest and that's really great because none of them have actually heard our stuff.

This is a very screwed-up business. Record labels don't sign a lot of bands these days. We just want to find a home and stay there and make records and do our thing and not have to look over our shoulder.

The hits I had in the '80s - I made those deals directly with American companies.

Doing things in my day was simple: you either signed to a big label or you signed to a very small label, and you worked with that one, and then they eventually signed you on to a big one.

I love music and musicians. And seeing great artists dropped from labels was really frustrating and sad to me.

The record company started as an adjunct to that, to give young composers their first recorded performances; to give young musicians their first debut on a recording. These are all things that big record companies would never touch because there is no money in it!

Honestly, when I got to Hollywood I was trying to sell my songs.

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 having a lot of mixed feelings about the independent world as well as the label world. I feel like I've been in the game a long time, and you know, when it come to labels not seeing a fella being around the last five years, it's like, it's hard to convince them what I can do.

I am a singer first and foremost. I was lucky enough to have a manager, when I was 15, who knew the heads of a lot of record labels at the time.

I like Rick Ross as a person. I like Jay-Z and Kanye West as people. But I hate the companies that they record for.

There are a lot of actors who try to get records made and try to make record deals, and everybody goes, 'Ugh.' It used to be expected in the entertainment business. I mean look at Sinatra, Bing Crosby. All these guys started out as singers.

Major labels act as banks in terms of how they produce and release your album. No major label is really good or bad; they just 100 per cent operate as a business, which makes sense... no hard feelings.

I never had to ask Def Jam for anything.

By the time 1997 had rolled around, I had been in the music business for all my life, from the age of 15. I started recording professionally when I was 18. I had seen how record companies work, how the business works, and truth be told, I was pretty disgusted by everything by that time.

I want to be in control of how my music is released and how I create it. What people don't talk about when they talk about major labels is how many artists get dropped or funding gets dropped when they don't recoup quick enough.

I make a lot of money off featuring, doing songs with up-and-coming artists. I can charge someone $10,000 to $15,000 to do one song.

I just think that any person who wants music to be their career shouldn't focus on a record label. I have seen friends who sign to a label too early in their career, and they lost control over their music, and their releases were delayed or never put out.

Signing with Sony/ATV was life changing for me.

If a new artist comes, and he doesn't have a good record label to invest in him, then there is no point.

Getting a record deal is a meaningless thing now.

I left the entertainment industry part of my life behind in 1983, when we decided not to work with major record companies anymore.