Rory Gallagher Quotes

I'm just not interested in selling out to get on the charts and make people happy.

If any of our songs ever did make it on the top ten, I'd disband the group immediately.

Of course, you're not making records in a vacuum. I'm not making them for myself. It would be nice if I could get more people to hear them. But if I have to sell my soul to the devil to do it, I won't.

I would rather fall flat on my face than try to just make a quick dollar by making music that fits into the radio format right now. It does nothing for me.

In the music industry, we value large success. I realized that while I would like that, that it's not what my writing is about. And if I start making it about that, it becomes impure.

To say that an artist sells out means that an artist is making a conscious choice to compromise his music, to to weaken his music for the sake of commercial gain.

There's no real excuse for being successful enough as an actor to do what you want and then selling out. You do it pure. You don't try to adapt it, make it commercial.

It's really weird how the rock world is quickly becoming like the jazz world. How if you do OK, or get a tiny bit of success, that's considered a sellout, whether you did anything different or not.

The challenge artists face today is whether to be an underground, unheard genius, or to dilute their art for the marketplace.

I'm not saying I wasn't flawed or amateurish. But you can never say I did anything to appease the music business.

The artists in country music who stopped having hits are the ones who were led into something that wasn't them.

It's a strange thing, this idea that for some reason, if a lot of people like what you're doing, it's therefore not very good. We use the phrase that a band have 'sold out.' Just so you know, if you're doing a gig and you sell all your tickets, that is a brilliant thing to do.

If you go to Hollywood, you've already sold out.

Who decides what is and what isn't punk? I want to write songs that people hear and feel, and I want to be successful and reach a big audience. I'm not trying to be the coolest guy in the world; I'm trying to write songs that mean something to people. As you get successful, sometimes you lose one set of fans and gain another.

With Lady Antebellum, there's always pressure. It's hard for commerce not to rear its ugly head when you're making decisions.

In my opinion, some of the hip-hop records that come out, people are willing to compromise. I'm not.

I do hip-hop music, and I've gotten famous off of hip-hop music, and I know that I'm successful, and I've created my own definition of success, what success means to me. So the hip-hop world is all just really fake to me.

I don't think you're selling out by allowing the masses to love your art. The only curse is that, when you get so big, sometimes people forget to look at the music.

I know how to make a record that commercial radio or Triple J will smash now... It's kind of hard to stay true and write what you would write if you didn't have that in your head. Because I know I can get way more airplay and get this much bigger... and that's what I'm trying to avoid doing. Trying to avoid the poisons of success.

The music business is a crazy game, especially for somebody like me who is really a purist about the art. Trying to balance the pressures of commercialism, it's a tightrope. It's a fine line between sticking to your guns and insanity.

We're just nerds that play music. Because we get played on the radio and have a Vitaminwater ad with Aaron Paul dancing on a treadmill, people are going to say we sold out. I don't write music for that. I write music for me.

I don't see Hollywood as the big enemy, because this is where the money is, and not all of the companies are doing studio movies. I'm not tempted to sell out. If I'm going to become well known, I want it to be for something I'm proud of.

When no one's buying your records, it's easy to justify selling a song. But once you start selling records, you can't really justify having two songs in Cadillac commercials. It looks greedy. And it is greedy. This whole music thing should be about music.

From the moment I went to Hollywood for the first time, I was accused by various people of selling out. So I feel I've done my sell-out films already. I've sold everything! I've sold every piece of soul I ever had!

Any band that is out there chasing it is doing more destruction to music then someone who is out there playing what they truly feel.