Statik Selektah Quotes

I think for us, we don't feel like the future of music is in the act of being a record company. We feel like the future of the music business is in empowering artists to have better and better tools to communicate with their fans. We want to be people who are saying to artists, "Look, you don't need that company over there to release your album. You can do it this way." Almost more of a band partnership than a label-artist relationship. Not about ownership of content, but about empowerment.

I have a fan base worldwide, man. I think they're really down for me. That's how I got signed - 30,000 fans retweeting Rick Ross.

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

I don't think they like the idea that the people who are buying the record get to choose what goes out, because it's their job. The fans even pre-ordered stock to make sure that I had some sort of presence.

YouTube provides a unique opportunity for all musicians to market and promote their music and directly engage their fans.

I always figured it was best if I write my songs, take them to my publisher and just lay back. There used to be so many things going on - getting to the artist, getting to the publishers - you know, politics. I just didn't want to get mixed up in all of that.

For the music business, social networking is brilliant. Just when you think it's doom and gloom and you have to spend millions of pounds on marketing and this and that, you have this amazing thing now called fan power. The whole world is linked through a laptop. It's amazing. And it's free. I love it. It's absolutely brilliant.

I've always said that if you have songs on the radio and get played, you've got to have a tour to support that.

There may be a new album, and there may not. Right now, we're encouraging bootlegging because there have been some great live things that ended up on the Internet. Rather than try to stop it, we like it. If nobody gave a crap about you, they wouldn't bother to bootleg you.

A few years ago, one of our singles got beaten out by Better Than Ezra. The label could only have one band at a time being taken to the right people at radio, and they opted for Better Than Ezra instead of us. Who knows.

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.

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

I've literally never seen a crowd react to a band the way they react to the Polysics. Signing them to MySpace Records was an obvious choice. I wanted to be the person to bring this seasoned band to a new culture and audience. I'm really proud of them.

I think 'Interscope' always puts the artist first, and they're focusing on these artists' development. I felt like that was a part of my career that I kind of needed to focus on after having come from the radio and getting exposure that way. I wanted to grow my brand and grow my fanbase, and they have proven to be the best fit for that.

I would do a documentary about Jay-Z. Yes, I would.

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'm a rapper to a lot of people. But I'm also someone who is very entrepreneurial.

I thought that the music industry was going to be pretty easy - getting features and stuff - and everyone was going to be nice. But I realized that it's really, really hard to get features.

SiriusXM has been an unbelievable way for us to share music. Songs move a lot faster there than they do on terrestrial, so hopefully we can continue to partner with satellite radio as a way to share as much music as possible with our fans.

There was a time when people would go search out underground records. Now, underground means free, and people don't really care for it. So now artists tend to go more pop and look for the radio. You know, the radio never wanted you to speak about anything, so the music is kinda influenced by the hands of the radio which wants to homogenize it and dilute it and sanitize it. And for the most part, nobody's takin' the time to seek out the cats that are still tryin' to talk, so they have a difficult time being heard, like Chuck D said.

Recorded music has always been in a sense promotion for live performance, and some artists have discovered that giving it away is as effective as trying to sell it.

There's a machine that I have nothing to do with. It's called the "Tupac Machine."

Here's the tragedy of the modern record business: It's radio. If you're not on radio, nobody really is going to hear you or see you or care about you.

The label's going great, because we're not idiots. We're not trying to sue everyone that downloads everything. We try to give the fans a bunch of free stuff, and then have them buy the record. Without buying the record, it doesn't support your artist. These idiots like Radiohead and Sharon Osbourne that are like, "Free Ozzfest!", "Pay what you can for a record!" - Radiohead's already got their yachts and mansions. Sharon Osbourne already has her empire.

The big labels have less of a stranglehold on artists and how they record and where they go.