Frank Black Quotes

When you're on the pop treadmill, you don't always feel that cool because you have to do things to promote the record that aren't necessarily your environment.

And you have a record company behind it, this is a key too, you need people to fight for your records, at least a little bit. So if you have a great song, it's catchy, and you've got a little bit of help, I think that's all you need. But there hasn't been that in music.

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

In the music business, I found it was much more about interviews, photo shoots and appearances rather than actual performing, which I do best.

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.

I remember when I first came out as an artist, back in 2004 or 2005, the record label used to take me to all the radio stations and just have me sit in, like, their lunchroom or their conference room, and play for the whole staff. Just to introduce them to me so they would play my records.

When 'Hide Away' first started gaining a bit of momentum, I was visiting at least two radio stations per day - sometimes in different cities - to spread the word about the song. It was a hustle, but so worth it.

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

You know, I didn't have enough money to quit my day job... the myth of the major label deal. Nowadays, you have a tour bus and a stylist and all this stuff. But back then, no way.

I can work my butt off and create an album that's wonderful, but if it's never played and never given the outlet, it won't succeed.

I hate the industry even more now, no bands get nurtured anymore. Labels only spend money promoting acts they know will be Top Ten. I find it offensive spending $2 million on a video.

Any real record person knows that the number one most powerful marketing tool when it comes to music is repetition.

There are certainly things labels can still provide that indie artists can't. They can pave the way to radio and pay big bucks for promotion.

I enjoy touring. I enjoy recording the music, I enjoy dreaming it and I enjoy performing it. I also definitely enjoy selling it, because I like to eat.

Being a recording artist, selling music, selling concerts out, having a reality show, starting film; it's great, it's beautiful.

I used to read music books when I was 13. My mom was working at a library. She's a librarian. I would get my mom to check out any kind of books that had anything to do with the music industry. I read a lot about royalities, publishing, marketing, stuff like that.

When radio stations started playing music the record companies started suing radio stations. They thought now that people could listen to music for free, who would want to buy a record in a record shop? But I think we all agree that radio stations are good stuff.

After you make good, quality music, then it's your job to go out there and promote it and to market it and to get it out there to the people.

It doesn't take a year to sing a song. Takes a year for people to figure out how to market it.

On our studio album 'Fly From Here' in 2011, we spent a year and a half promoting that around the world.

Since I was 17, I had been just making records and promoting them.

You know, if nobody knows who you are, nobody's going to buy your record.

Traditionally the show must go on which is a stupid thing to say, but that in a nutshell is what's going on. We have a new record out; if we won't tour, the new record dies. It's reality - it's what business is nowadays. You just need to tour to sell your albums.

There's nothing remotely interesting to me about marketing music as a product.

Records are very powerful promotional tools to go out and be able to play on the road, but you do have to think about it as a way of sustaining itself at some point.