Win Butler Quotes

The bricks and mortar of the music business, they don't exist any longer.

Major labels didn't start showing up really until they smelled money, and that's all they're ever going to be attracted to is money-that's the business they're in- making money.

I truly believe, as an institution, most major labels should just die.

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.

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

I now believe that major labels can only work with people who care more about fame and money than the quality of the art they produce.

Major labels have always been around our band since the beginning, and we just waited. We knew we had to do some things, and we needed to grow as a band before we made that step. We needed to do it our way and not do it how it works for other people.

I completely understand why labels would be a little bit hesitant to sign somebody coming off of a television show, in their first glance.

I don't really see a difference in independent and major labels. To me, it's pretty much the same. There used to be a difference between indies and major labels, but I don't think there is anymore.

Record labels today are much less patient: Artists have a bad record, and they're gone.

I've been approached by major labels every single year of my existence as an artist. Since 1996.

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.

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.

There aren't enough people who are scaring the kind of people who work at these record companies.

Equal Vision seems to be doing really well. A lot of these major labels are just imploding and becoming indie labels, anyway.

When certain bootleg companies started off and they would take maybe ten per cent of whatever they got and help fuel new bands, which I'm cool with, I think that's a good idea. Most of the record companies are not doing that.

A lot of very popular mainstream artists are products of record companies and marketing companies, and any time anyone can stand outside of that, that's interesting.

Most of the time when people work with an artist, they don't give them what they need for the future, they give them what their last album sounded like. So it's like, 'Oh, One Republic needs a song, why don't we send them 10 that sound like 'Apologize?'

I built a reputation as a songwriter in the industry before my own hits. People were used to coming to me for songs. There were songs like 'Clown' and 'Mountains' that were my songs that I wanted to keep. But the record labels saw me as a songwriter. It was hard to get people to believe in me as an artist.

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.

Artists were nurtured back in the '70s. Their music was developed by the record companies.

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.

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 got all these books about, like, what you need to know to enter the entertainment industry. And I remember I sent my music to record labels, and I took these little DVDs and sent them all over the place. And either no one got back to me or they just kept saying, 'You're too different.'

Labels are curators of taste, and the best ones know how to monetize what an artist is trying to do.