Malcolm Wilson Quotes

Hip-hop is such a disposable art form from a business standpoint. It never treats its artists as art; it never treats its product as art.

What's scummy about the music industry is that everybody loves you when you're dead.

Everything Ticketmaster stands for is what we're fighting against. They're just a small cog in a machine where the artist is at the bottom.

I'm just saying the producers and people who work on music are getting left out - that's when it starts getting criminal. It's like you're working hard, and you're not receiving. In any other business, people would be standing before Congress. They have antitrust laws against this kind of behavior.

Record contracts are just like - I'm gonna say the word - slavery. I would tell any young artist... don't sign.

A record is a commodity, but so is a hamburger. Just because I work at McDonald's doesn't mean I reap the benefits of that commodity. That's the reality with most artists in the record industry: They're getting paid a subsistence wage so they can keep producing a commodity for the record label.

I did albums for Cash Money. I didn't do singles - I did whole albums for Cash Money - and at the end of the day, I'm saying I wasn't paid for albums, so its like you're doing 10 songs, and somebody pays you for 1.

If you don't enjoy making work, then it's bad. It's rough. Artwork is brutal for so many people. They let it happen to them, but it's brutal. I like the idea of an artist as somebody who works. A lot of the artists I like share this understanding.

The intentions of record companies are not good, from the musician's perspective.

I have both exploited and been exploited in the print field.

The music industry can make you feel like a prostitute.

The cult of individuality and personality, which promotes painters and poets only to promote itself, is really a business. The greater the 'genius' of the personage, the greater the profit.

I feel Motown really exploited me.

An actress is not a machine, but they treat you like a machine. A money machine.

The industry is a menace to artists.

All art is exploitation.

Everything about the music industry takes away from you as an artist. They're always wondering what the next thing is: 'What do you have?' It's a very introverted process.

Record companies would rather you stay dumb, not even think of it as a business, so they can either rip you off or get you out of the way in five years to make way for the new groups.

If you wanna make money in music, you're better off being on the business end of it a lot of the time. And also as a musician, if you do make money, it means you had to bite and scratch and kick the whole way to not get ripped off, because at every corner, there's somebody there waiting to trip you up and take a bigger chunk.

That is how America gets her art: Contracting firms get the contract and the honor. Starving artists do the work. The government pays for sculpturing thousands of dollars, of which the sculptor gets a hundred or so.

You have gigantic companies feeding off musicians and artists because the artists need the exposure.

They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work.

For the essential thing about the work of art is that it is work, and very hard work too.

The record companies really do conspire against the artists. Especially the black artists

on Broadway money rules. Like a host of vultures, the ticket brokers, the speculators, the craft unions, the agents, the backers, the real estate owners move in on the creative body and take their bite. The world of dreams breathes in an iron lung; and without this mechanical pumping it dies.