Ahmed Best Quotes

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.

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.

A lot of people are trying to get me to go solo. It's just a thing I have to deal with a lot. Record labels are always trying to get me to go solo.

In a sense, the music business and I haven't always been the best of bedfellows. Artists often have to fight their corner. Your music goes through these filters of record labels and media, and you're hoping you'll find someone who'll help you get your work into the world.

Artist development is something that I've been passionate about from my days at Uptown and Motown Records.

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

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 had business experience. I had made my living designing and building electronic equipment. Basic business was not new to me, but the music business was completely new to me. I knew nothing about distribution, or any of those things.

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.

If you have good songs and a real desire to make music, the next thing to do, instead of approach record companies, is to get yourself a really good manager because then it allows you to focus on your profession of being a musician. Then they can focus on the darker art of the record label and the music industry.

I was signed by L.A. Reid on Arista Records when I was 16. He understood me and believed in me. Arista folded and I got put on RCA or whatever, then there were new people there, and every six months it changes and more new people come in.

Island Records was the first record label to... acknowledge me. After that, quickly, Republic Records, and then Atlantic Records, Sony Records and Warner Bros. It was all the labels at once. It was absolutely insane, like, knowing that this many record labels were interested in me.

At the end of the day, you sign a record deal and you understand where it could go if you had the right song.

You have major labels that are willing to take unconventional approaches because the old model is crumbling in front of us.

I think we in the Alpha Band, which was a strange group anyway, weren't dealing with any of these issues. They sneaked up on us and took us over, before we know what was going on.

The music industry is a strange combination of having real and intangible assets: pop bands are brand names in themselves, and at a given stage in their careers their name alone can practically gaurantee hit records.

The music business is one of a few places where everything you've heard about it seems entirely cliche, but it's true.

I have an independent record label called Favored Nations on which I released an album by an artist called Johnny A, who plays an arch top Gibson through a Marshall, but the tone is all in his fingers.

I wanted to produce Nancy LaMott's albums, so I created my own record company.

I am going into the adult market because they don't care what label you are signed to or who you know.

I'm developing artists for my new record label, my son's band, Intangible, being one of them.

When I got my record deal at Atlantic, at the time, 'indie' wasn't a style of music: it was a kind of label. And I think, eventually, the bands that ended up on those labels began to be branded as 'indie bands,' and then it became a genre.

If anything, I'm the most hesitant to bring on a label. That terrifies me. I think people believe major labels are linked to success. They're absolutely not that.

Roc was only supposed to be our distributor, but then they ended up recruiting me as the label's artist. They said they really liked my album 'Everything You Wanted.'