Steve Stoute Quotes

Sometimes you get so jaded, you don't have those initial connections and emotions with music, because you are promoting your own.

You could be Top 5 on iTunes, but for people to buy an album, they've got to have a connection with an artist. Every time I bought someone's album, it was about the connection. I was loving everything, from their raps to their style. I wanted to meet them.

Record sales don't really mean anything. For us, the pressure is imagining some 15-year-old kid in Cincinnati who buys our album and doesn't feel like he wasted his pocket money.

It's one thing to be a fan and it's another thing to be a label.

Music is so hard. It's a struggle to get people to care. It's hard to make an impact in today's world because people aren't buying records anymore.

It's like, it's up to the people to fall in love with the song. The record company can only do so much.

I feel that when I listen to music - not that it's bad - it's not emotional. It has a gimmick to it. It's selling something: the artist, the producer, something. The emotional capacity is very small, for the listener as well.

Coming from the music business and seeing the transition from artists to fans, fans to consumers, it's really about understanding the psychology of why people want to associate with your brand.

You gotta start somewhere. It is what it is. People listen to Soundcloud more than the radio. So why would you put your music on the radio first?

The videos have given us a younger audience. You know, our audience grew up with us until the videos, and they were beginning to get a little long in the tooth. Then the videos came along, and now we've recaptured the 16-year-old girls. The 16-year-old girls!

People want to connect with what they're purchasing.

We cut songs that touch us because if they don't touch us first, there's no way in the world we're going to be able to sell those songs to somebody else.

You've gotta really touch people to move them to buy your records.

As it is with anything, if you have tuned your song well, it will be appreciated whenever it is released, especially now that FM stations and television channels are there ensure that it reaches the audience.

I'm used to people not getting it. I'll make amazing music, but it's convincing people that it's amazing - that's the problem.

It's cool to hear my songs on the radio. But for me, that's just a way to get more people to have the option of choosing my music.

There's not a great danger in releasing the first single from an album without a video because the momentum from the last album will cause large numbers of fans to buy it.

It used to be OK to have two or three songs out a year - and those are your singles. Now, they don't want that. They're like, 'OK, I heard that. Next!'

You have to make people feel things. I think that's what commercials are, from a commercial for a car, a phone or anything that might be, they want to do it. The first iPhone was sold by how exciting it was to hold pictures of your family, not how great a phone it was.

I want my fans to listen to my music. Period.

I make records all the time. But making records is not quite the same as getting them to the audience.

The hardest part about the music industry for anyone is getting into the ears of the world.

There's always a market for music.

We wanna be on the frontlines of everything new and exciting. The old world order of putting out four singles before you release an album is so boring to us.

So if radio flops, and MTV flops and everything flops, it doesn't matter, as long as we're still playing and kids are coming to our shows.