Declan Donnelly Quotes

Jay-Z, he knows precisely who he's going for - 14-year-old white suburban girls.

Commercial music, for the most part, is popular music and you always have to keep that in mind.

I would sell 2 million records, a million went to teenagers and a million went to the adults. So, when The Beatles became so popular, I lost a million to the teenagers, but I was still selling a million to the adults.

England's a small nation, and the pop music industry is built on fashion.

Our audience isn't One Direction, Katy Perry, Rihanna fans.

I grew up in the era of the concept album. What I do now is pick up on singles, and they are their own complete stories; you don't necessarily have to hear the rest of the album because I don't think albums are created like that anymore. They get songs from all over the place.

Radio is aimed at the 30-year-old market, so you have to have great music and appeal to get that age group. And you need a record company to believe in you. It's like a bit of the perfect storm.

The only thing that exists to me is commercial pop music.

I think it's ridiculous to try to sell records to teenagers, because teenagers don't buy my records. And there ain't that many teenagers out there in the marketplace.

There were a lot of times where there was a great deal of fodder recorded and played, because there was a market for it - just as there is today. And there were more bad bands than there were good bands - I think that should always be remembered.

I think it's a reflection of the music business in general, which to me seems very fragmented.

When I hear other artists talk, they talk about 'How come radio's not playing my song?' Well, you have to look at it under a microscope and know that each station is just trying to do what's right for their market, and it's scary for a radio station to add a song that they don't know how well it's gonna do for them.

The biggest problem is always getting hits. That's the one thing that has never changed. The way of delivering music has changed, the way of listening to it has changed, the way of distributing it has changed, but it's always the music.

I'm making music for the people. If y'all love the music, y'all gonna buy the music.

Pop music I have always loved best. But the more extreme, fascist-led examples of the music business I tend to detest the most.

My father would make record after record, and he'd be so surprised at what would sell and what wouldn't.

I don't quite know how the urban music category came about, but I suspect it had something to do with trying to maximise sales.

As a producer putting up music, I wasn't dropping a project to do this much numbers or make this amount of money, I really just dropped a project for the streets and the culture of music.

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!

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!'

In hindsight, I feel like I made the right decision to choose production that would get played on black radio.

Most companies that are successful listen to people and see what they want and they make that. So when I used to make songs, I'd make mixtapes. The public would tell me what they like and then I would make songs based on what they like. That's how I knew 'Ridin' Dirty' was going to be big - they told me they liked this kind of music.

I don't like the way a lot of music is going these days. No one buys it.

You have to know who you're making music for.

They understand what their market is and who they should be selling records to, and most importantly, they know the kind of artist that they want to be, but they have to do it themselves. You don't want a 13-year-old singing some awful song from a musical.