Pat Benatar Quotes

I saw an Elvis Presley movie Jailhouse Rock, where he gets out of jail and makes his own records and takes them to the radio stations himself. And then, he puts records in the store. After seeing that, I made records an put them in stores.

This is a business built on promotion. We've been giving music away to radio stations for 30 years.

If you want to put out a million CDs and sell them and get them played on the radio, and even videos, or whatever, if that still exists, that kind of muscle can only come from a label like Columbia.

I remember when I first came out as an artist, back in 2004 or 2005, the record label used to take me to all the radio stations and just have me sit in, like, their lunchroom or their conference room, and play for the whole staff. Just to introduce them to me so they would play my records.

A lot of true Jamaican artists don't understand the importance of radio so tend not to tap into that as a result.

Our records are commodities. We're looking to make a sale. The radio stations are looking to get the advertising dollars. The end.

'Dance' got on WBLS and over 25 urban AC stations. I never had a record on urban AC and gospel stations before.

We were number one most added at radio, when the single came out and that's much different. It took like eight months for any radio to happen on the first record, so a lot more support has happened right out of the box.

I can work my butt off and create an album that's wonderful, but if it's never played and never given the outlet, it won't succeed.

The music industry is saying, This is the format, and if you'll fit into this format, you can be on radio, and if radio will play you, MTV will expose you, and MTV will expose you, we'll sell records.

And you have a record company behind it, this is a key too, you need people to fight for your records, at least a little bit. So if you have a great song, it's catchy, and you've got a little bit of help, I think that's all you need. But there hasn't been that in music.

There are certainly things labels can still provide that indie artists can't. They can pave the way to radio and pay big bucks for promotion.

I think when you put a new record out, everyone has a song or two that they feel people will be moved by so much that radio will be forced to play it.

When you're on the pop treadmill, you don't always feel that cool because you have to do things to promote the record that aren't necessarily your environment.

I've made my records and I've done all the interviews. I've done lots of long tours. I've made stupid videos. I've done all that stuff and learned all the lingo and gone to radio stations and shmoozed with DJs on the air and met retail people.

Even though I've been reasonably well known for quite a long time, I still can't get a record on daytime radio or on MTV.

On our studio album 'Fly From Here' in 2011, we spent a year and a half promoting that around the world.

I'd love to get played on the radio, but it just doesn't happen.

There has never been any proper commitment to marketing these artists and their music. We are not Sony.

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.

I paid my dues. I have crawled to gigs. I have served people coffee. I worked hard selling all these records out the back of my car. Girl, I'm ready to sell one the real way now.

It used to be that if you had a pretty good record, you could stop by a station in Little Rock or Atlanta and let the DJ listen to it. No way something like that can happen now.

I was really amazed when I started hearing 'Songbird' on the radio. I couldn't believe that the record company promotion department had actually convinced radio music directors to play it -because there wasn't anything like it on the radio at the time.

After we wrote The Wreckoning, our record label did listen.

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.