Aaron Neville Quotes

I never used to get calls from artists or labels, but once you have a top 20 hit, you start getting them.

My hits are not hits.

It was so simple in the old days. You put out an album, people promoted it, it got in the charts, and you had a hit.

Unless I've got Katy Perry on the cover of my CD, it's going to be tough to sell a lot of records.

We were just hoping 'Prayin' for Daylight' wasn't a complete flop. Selling a million records wasn't even in our wildest thoughts.

When you are a commercial music artist, your music depends on your popularity.

J Cole went platinum with no features, and I wanna go platinum!

Once we put 'So Anxious' out, it was a wrap.

Now that I'm with RCA, they were able to get radio on board, and it's just really awesome to see their support and 'What Ifs' going to No. 1.

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.

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.

Even though the popularity and the fanbase is much much greater, and more people have heard about me through things like the Grammys and the Ivors and touring and word of mouth, it doesn't reflect in the sales of the record and doesn't go into my pocket.

Every song I put on a record could be a single and I just pack my bags for it... and the minute it takes off, I'm not gonna be home for a while.

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

I genuinely don't know how many albums I'm going to sell when the new album comes out, because I honestly don't know how many fans I've actually got at the moment.

I mean in recent years, I think you've only got to sell thirty or forty thousand to get a #1.

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

MTV made a huge impact. Heavy rotation took you from selling 1m albums to 20m albums, and that meant a lot of dough.

When people see you have a song on MTV, they think you are doing well - but you know, the way the traditional label deal was set up, it is really hard for an artist, unless they sold a lot, to see anything.

When our video of 'Smooth Criminal' came out, suddenly we started getting all kinds of offers. We were getting calls from TV shows like 'Ellen DeGeneres' and from record labels.

I think it'd be a real nightmare to put a record out and sell 20 million copies and then that's it.

Every year, we couldn't believe it, and even when I look back on it now, to sell 14 million singles, 50 million albums and sell out arenas and stadiums, what Westlife achieved was crazy. It's like One Direction probably don't realise how big they are. They'll look back one day and think, 'Holy God, that was pretty amazing.'

A No. 1 record is hard to come by.

With every record I put out, I got a bit more success, a bigger following in cities I would play in, and occasionally a bit of radio play.

But now it's kind of a given that a 15-year-old would have a record deal and sell a quarter of a million records. No one's expecting her to answer any deep theological questions. And I'll tell you, I was asked some deep theological questions from the git-go.