Mura Masa Quotes

The new artist is meeting the general public before they meet the record company. They're able to put the material on YouTube and have a million views before they even meet an executive at a record company, and get the deal based on that.

There are millions of people who consume music illegally every month. Just getting them into a legal service will make the music industry way bigger than it's ever been before.

SoundCloud took a community-first approach to building its business, prioritizing finding artists to post on its service over making deals with music labels to license their music, the approach taken by Spotify.

There's a lot of artists whose contracts are written in such a way that they do not get paid for what's happening on streaming services.

The music industry is very small.

If you're not on a major label today, you're not gonna get played. They've got the market sewed up.

Nowadays you need so much money to be able to launch a new artist, notably in America; you would hardly believe the sums involved.

The music industry over there seems to treat America like it's one territory even though they got offices in different parts of America - they're still quite sort of 'America is the territory.'

Today, if you do put out a record on a label, traditionally, most people are going to hear it via a leak that happens two weeks - if not two months - before it comes out. There's no real way around that.

I get sick when I think about someone going to iTunes and downloading two songs off our album. It's not meant to be listened to that way.

It's a cruel, heartless world out there in commercial rock 'n' roll, and when you take as much time off as we did, eight years, booking agents don't know if you'll draw.

There's no more record companies, so I have to get on the Internet and let people know the album is out there. I don't know if we're working for it, or if it's working for us.

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.

A platform is the base from which something big happens. In our case, we're an entertainment platform in the sense that there are people signing up like MTV, Burberry, folks like Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber. And why? Because it's their channel to control their entertainment to their fans.

Music is more available than ever. It's up to people to figure out. Ultimately, it's up to the business to figure out what the business is, monetizing that.

When you're an independent artist, you need as much play or promotion as you can get.

I'll tell you who doesn't get enough credit, Soulja Boy. He was the first one to do something, post it, yank it down, and sell more records because of it.

I suppose Spotify is a good thing. The ads are quite annoying, but a lot of people seem to like it and use it. I don't myself, but it seems like a good idea, and the labels are getting a huge amount of money off it, but the artists aren't, so that must be good for them... but not us.

I went to college during the Kazaa/Napster era, and we had free Internet, which was a huge deal. People were just downloading all of everything.

I enjoy putting out singles.

Companies like Spotify, the new Apple service, and all the others are really going to have to pay artists more. And I think it's a matter of time; I think a lot of these companies and the individuals that are involved in them realize that as well. They know that artists are not getting what they should be getting.

Shy Carter helped me write 'One Call Away.' He is a brand new artist. I really want to help jumpstart his career because I think he's super-talented.

While working for Diplomat Records, I helped several artists with their online branding and social media. Once I left the label, I worked directly with artists and noticed many artists were overlooked and underrated if they weren't in 'XXL' or 'The Source.'

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.

I think, as an industry, we should be supportive of a broad subscription model and not do anything to jeopardize the potential health of the music business - because we're not out of the woods yet.