Bruno Mars Quotes

But what you realise after you've been in the business for a while is that people develop opinions about you that don't have anything to do with your music, they like or dislike you for a million reasons, they like or dislike you for your last record.

There are people that bring artists to me to look at it and it's a question of whether I like their music and their look and if I think there's something they have that makes them different and commercial.

My music and my fan base is really built off of my lifestyle.

I just want to get my music out and make sure that it's heard in the right way.

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.

The whole point of 'Acid Rap' was just to ask people a question: does the music business side of this dictate what type of project this is? If it's all original music and it's got this much emotion around it and it connects this way with this many people, is it a mixtape? What's an 'album' these days, anyways?

I think this whole division between the genres has more to do with marketing than anything else. It's terrible for the culture of music.

You don't want the biggest record deal as far as money goes, you just want to make sure that the people at the label really support your band and the music and stuff.

I would love to continue working behind the scenes in music - to produce and manage up-and-coming musical talent would be a dream!

I was very disenchanted in the industry for a long time before I met GaGa. Everyone wanted a 'Single Ladies' for their artist, or a Puffy move.

Shoot, there's a committee to tell you everything at a record label. You definitely have to know who you are if you want to look like you at the end of the process. We've all seen people get record contracts, and by the time they're spit out by the machine, we don't even recognize them.

There's this misconception in the industry that you might have to go a little lighter or skate on the surface in order to reach people - and then in your second album, you get to tell who you are.

Our managers hadn't had that kind of success - the record company hadn't, we hadn't - and the feeling was that the next record had to be even bigger, and if it wasn't it would be some kind of failure.

The problem with working under an outside label is that your music never seems to reach the right people.

Basically we just created our own label, but again we just did it to document our own music and create our own thing, so the major labels were just always out of our picture, we're not interested.

I started growing my audience in small clubs through word-of-mouth. I started making music that isn't necessarily commercially viable, and it's not necessarily marketable to my peers to a certain extent.

I think it's always a mistake when you start connecting a band to a personality. You begin to limit what you're able to do.

I don't think the label makes the artist or the artist makes the label. It's the music that makes everything work or not.

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.

There's a system in place in Nashville, and for a long time, I was trapped in this idea that the only way to do it was to come to town, get a record deal, and do it the way they say. And that system works. But it caters to a specific kind of artist, and I didn't necessarily fit that mold.

Back in the day, if someone at the record label didn't care or like your music, it never got to the public. It just got shelved.

When I first started, I wasn't really aware of anything in the industry or aware of who I really was. I just put my music out there and tried to get as many people to hear it as possible. I hadn't really thought about the kind of music I wanted to make.

When my first album came out, it wasn't Bollywood.

We don't want to categorize our music. Some people say you need a definite musical direction to give a group visibility.

I remember when we were mixing our record and our manager was in there going, 'You guys need to sing more, so it can be on the radio.' And we were like 'What? We're never going to get played on the radio. Who cares? What are you talking about?'