Killer Mike Quotes

My biggest frustration is the lack of scale in the music industry. The fact that no one has sold 100 million copies of an album is frustrating.

It's harder and harder to sell records now. You've got to give extra value. You've got to give people a reason to go out and buy it rather than burn a friend's copy.

Recorded music is more a marketing tool than a revenue source.

When radio stations started playing music the record companies started suing radio stations. They thought now that people could listen to music for free, who would want to buy a record in a record shop? But I think we all agree that radio stations are good stuff.

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 easier for fans to consume one or two songs at a time. Not everybody buys records, so some songs can get overlooked.

I don't really sell many records.

It used to be that you made an album and then you went on the road to promote that album, hoping for good record sales. Well, good record sales basically don't exist any more, and the emphasis has been more on the live show.

I know acts and I'm not going to name names but these people sold ten million copies the first time and the second album sells three million and it's considered a failure and they're dropped and that's really a shame.

I actually don't think that I'm gonna sell a lot of records.

I don't think the label cares about an album... People just want their number-one record.

Now the music industry is sort of like a Craigslist venture, right? Where you're making your own records and selling them online.

Chart numbers can be deceiving. An album doesn't have to sell that much these days to show up really high on the charts.

Look at music for what it's worth around the world and not just America. In other countries, people are still buying CDs and going to record stores. But in America, it's all about digital. The game is breaking down. But, look at me, you need to know how to play the game the right way.

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.

Nowadays, you have to sell, like, half a million or a million records just to break even.

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

My best country record only sold 200,000 copies.

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.

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.

The way consumers interact with music is different now. It's not an albums business anymore; it's a singles business again, and the industry has gone through that before.

We sold 1.5 million copies of the 'Abracadabra' album and 26,000 copies of 'Italian X-Rays.'

But I can say that the business has changed drastically since I started at 8 years old. Everything from the way you tour to how you make a record and how you release the music.

Because record companies do not routinely release sales figures the way film studios do, the weekly charts in trade publications like 'Billboard' provide the best independent measure of record appeal.

I'd been an artist since I was 17 and I was used to just putting things on iTunes. So I was like, I need to educate myself and figure out the new industry.