India Arie Quotes

Radio is aimed at the 30-year-old market, so you have to have great music and appeal to get that age group. And you need a record company to believe in you. It's like a bit of the perfect storm.

We were number one most added at radio, when the single came out and that's much different. It took like eight months for any radio to happen on the first record, so a lot more support has happened right out of the box.

Any album that I ever put out I'm going to send it to country radio first.

I was really amazed when I started hearing 'Songbird' on the radio. I couldn't believe that the record company promotion department had actually convinced radio music directors to play it -because there wasn't anything like it on the radio at the time.

I've tried different things through the years to get some play on mainstream. I'll try to tailor-make it.

They understand what their market is and who they should be selling records to, and most importantly, they know the kind of artist that they want to be, but they have to do it themselves. You don't want a 13-year-old singing some awful song from a musical.

There will always be some kid who's the new Kurt Cobain writing great lyrics and singing from his soul. The problem is they're not marketing that anymore or putting it out there.

The music industry is saying, This is the format, and if you'll fit into this format, you can be on radio, and if radio will play you, MTV will expose you, and MTV will expose you, we'll sell records.

We can get airplay all across the board, from CHR to Active rock.

I think it's ridiculous to try to sell records to teenagers, because teenagers don't buy my records. And there ain't that many teenagers out there in the marketplace.

If you really want a radio station to play your song, go to that radio station every day with that song in your hand and say, 'Please play it.'

It's so hard to pick a 'single.' I always want it to be whatever my favorite tune is, but often the record company and the person whose job it is to take it to radio have different ideas.

I think when you put a new record out, everyone has a song or two that they feel people will be moved by so much that radio will be forced to play it.

As corny as it may sound, my true goal was to crack the Americana market.

I decided to combine my musical background, business education and creative abilities - and go into the record business.

I like the idea of working in an album-sized chunk, you know, and I never looked at Nine Inch Nails as a project that would be a hit-driven, single-based kind of thing.

This is a business built on promotion. We've been giving music away to radio stations for 30 years.

I'd love to get played on the radio, but it just doesn't happen.

When I hear other artists talk, they talk about 'How come radio's not playing my song?' Well, you have to look at it under a microscope and know that each station is just trying to do what's right for their market, and it's scary for a radio station to add a song that they don't know how well it's gonna do for them.

I just want to keep saturating the market and radio with as many hit records as I can.

I'm gonna be honest. I don't care about much. I care about people liking my music. I made it very far without nothing being on radio.

It used to be that if you had a pretty good record, you could stop by a station in Little Rock or Atlanta and let the DJ listen to it. No way something like that can happen now.

After we wrote The Wreckoning, our record label did listen.

Jay-Z, he knows precisely who he's going for - 14-year-old white suburban girls.

If I had to play only for people who liked the music because they heard it on the radio, it wouldn't make me happy. That's why I'm working so hard to have, yes, a profile as an artist, but also a profile as a DJ.