Justin Tranter Quotes

I have some lofty goals. I want 'You Broke Up With Me' to go Number One.

It was so simple in the old days. You put out an album, people promoted it, it got in the charts, and you had a hit.

We used to call it recurrent airplay when someone had a hit.

There are three things we need to do for a band. We need to make a great record; we need to get the record played; and we need to find an audience for the live shows.

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.

It's such a stupid thing to sign a band and then demand a hit right away to instantly recoup the money. The point is, you have to do it by building your own following, and that is not necessarily done by writing instant hits.

I don't ever have the pressure of making a hit, because I've never had a hit song, per se. The closest thing to a hit song was 'Shiraz,' and it's not your prototypical hit song, with a catchy hook and all this other stuff.

After two years in the songwriting world, I wrote 'All About That Bass.' L.A. Reid heard it and signed me as an artist.

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.

I just want to keep saturating the market and radio with as many hit records as I can.

In the middle of 'Bleed Red' coming out, a huge disproportionate majority of people in radio came to us and asked if they could have 'Cost of Livin' as a single. There was even talk behind closed doors about pulling 'Bleed Red' because they had caught wind and heard 'Cost of Livin'.' We went with that.

There's timing. And then there's also certain people at the record company who worked incredibly hard and were incredibly enthusiastic about what I was doing.

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.

I realized there are so many steps from getting a deal to having a hit.

Sometimes when you get in this game, you think that you're going to take off if you do a song with someone big. But that's not the truth. Everything with you got to be good - the visual, the push, the production.

The success of 'Take Me To Church,' I never imagined it. I never imagined that it would work on radio, that it would find its way onto the charts, even at home and certainly not in America.

I had a lot of songs which, I felt, if they come in an album, they can become bigger hits than in films.

The end game is always a hit song.

As an artist development platform, we've proven that all the work done behind the scenes at American Idol, along with surviving the rigors of the intense live shows, can properly prepare a winner for a real-world music career opportunity.

If a new artist wants to put out some sort of off-the-wall, crazy deep ballad about the sun or whatever, it might be hard to get traction. It's so much easier for someone established to put out a really heartfelt, deep song and get it played in radio.

It's really tough - if you're on a major label and they want you to have a number one song, you need to do what they say.

Now that I'm with RCA, they were able to get radio on board, and it's just really awesome to see their support and 'What Ifs' going to No. 1.

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

I think the process of 'I Love It' becoming such a big song opened my eyes to sides of the industry that I'd never been aware of, which I wasn't so into.