Lester Bowie Quotes

I'm just thankful that we were able to reach out to so many different fans that didn't know what our music was.

We need to bring music to the people, even to those who normally do not listen to classical music.

More than anything, I want to just have the largest amount of people possible listening to my music. This is the biggest thing to me.

We have a very loyal fan base, the kind tat buys the record the day it comes out, sees every show, and that's fantastic, but what about the people who would never hear about our band?

Distributing the music is so easy it's moot. So now the delicate art of calling attention to your music means everything. Marketing is distribution.

If you get half a million, at a certain stage you probably will get 4 million people, if they are able to hear it. The touring thing is unbelievable. It really is amazing from what we did the last tour even to what we are doing now.

I'm done with industrial. Seriously, my iPod collection at home has no industrial music on it; it's strictly jazz, blues and country.

My songs don't play on pop radio; they play on black radio.

We want our music to reach everybody, so we're using the Internet. Every kid today is online, and we want to make sure our songs reach every one of them.

Country seems to be finding a bigger audience. Certainly an audience out of the general country scene is finding me.

I would like to see more airplay for all artists, no matter what age. I think there's a lot of money being spent toward the young guys, but a lot of the older guys are the ones who blazed the trail for those young guys.

But I never had that commercial opportunity to be played on the radio, so how could I be popular?

I am trying to walk a tightrope; trying to keep the DJ community happy while trying to spread the message about dance music to more people. That is the mission that I am on.

The one thing the blues don't get is the backing and pushing of TV and radio like a lot of this garbage you hears. They choke stuff down people's throat so they got no choice but to listen to it.

As far as I'm concerned, the whole point of making music is to get it heard by as many people as possible.

As much as I am hip-hop, I'm soul. As much as I am soul, I'm a turntablist. As much as I'm a DJ, I love jazz and rock.

I find a lot of up-and-coming musicians I enjoy, present them to my viewers - and hopefully inflate the growth of these artists by putting them in front an audience that wouldn't have been aware of them.

The 'Inside' record definitely opened up a whole new audience.

And for REO - they get to play for some Styx fans and then we get to play in front of some REO fans. It helps spread the new music to the following of other bands.

The tough thing about radio is I've met a lot of people in it who like my music. But it's hard for them to figure out how to play what they like when there's somebody up above them yelling 'you have to play this.'

The problem with working under an outside label is that your music never seems to reach the right people.

It's really hard in this day and age, with radio and MTV being so consolidated, to get new music out there. I think we've become a really legitimate, viable avenue for getting new music out there.

One of the nice things about licensing music to movies or advertisements is you can reach a lot of people who normally wouldn't hear music.

I think that every time a country artist steps outside of the country boundary, it just brings more ears to us.

At one point, I didn't care. Now I want as many people to hear my music as possible.