Music Industry Pressure Quotes

It was, 'If you don't do 'The Show Goes On,' your album's not coming out.' I had nothing to do with that record - nothing. I was literally told how I should rap on it. But I'm a bastard, 'cos I'll turn around and put it back in your face.

The REM and Nirvana successes don't mean much to me except as a potential distraction for bands who want to cash in on the trend. Don't try to sound like someone else. REM and Nirvana don't sound like anyone else.

Often by the time writers and producers try to get a new hit song, the industry has already moved on. Whatever you're creating might not be as hot as it would have been during the time of your first hit. It definitely compromises the creative process when the music is changing and evolving so fast. If you're not on top of it, you will be forgotten.

A lot of people thought my career was over. If you're not releasing records, then something must be wrong. Either the record company doesn't like your music, or you've been dropped. It has to something negative. It's not like you wanted to take a break, or want some balance, or smell the roses.

I don't want to have that thing where I make an album and then I'm super-constantly present in everyone's life for three years, and then gone for the next three.

In the mid-1980s to the early 1990s I was writing songs not because I particularly liked what I was doing, but because I was desperately trying to get back into the charts. I really didn't enjoy it. I didn't like the music I was making, I wasn't proud of it, like I have been before or since.

All I want to do is give the world my heart... Record label tryina make me compromise my art.

I just hope people don't get sick of us. I'm sick of us and I'm in Destiny's Child.

I get love from fans in a big enough dosage that it acts as a shield, and I would not sacrifice that love in order to please the industry.

In the '80s, I was putting out an album virtually every year, I think mostly based on fear - that if I didn't, people would soon forget about me.

They wanted to 'radiofy' what I was doing. I was also in a position where I was compromised. I was much younger and maybe it is because I am Irish but there was a guilt factor when the record company pays you a lot of money, you feel obliged.

I've withdrawn many times. Part of me is a monk, and part a performing flea! The fear in the music business is that you don't exist if you're not at Xenon with Andy Warhol.

If I had been thrown out into a radio tour when I was 18, or 17, and given a record deal, I don't think... it would have been a total nightmare.

If we were to hit the level that Metallica or somebody like that hit, we'd have had a hard time dealing with it. I think it would have been our doom. It's hard for anybody at that level.

It wasn't that we were afraid of the Church or the Vatican. The record company thought people might find the title offensive. They asked me if I would change ["A Deal with God"].

For the first ten years of my career, I felt suffocated. People constantly stood over me while I tried to create. And in 2009, I hit rock bottom. I couldn't find myself because I was looking to be defined by the music industry or by being number one on the Billboard charts.

I think a lot of bands are creatively knackered when they come off tour.

I had taken some of my solo music into the record label. They didn't really care for the direction I was moving in and I found it really disheartening. They wanted a pop hit, which I understand in terms of making money. I get that. But what they were going to ask of me was something I wasn't prepared to deliver and I felt kind of trapped. I just stopped writing. I just stopped. It was stifling.

Typically, every 14 to 16 months, we're putting a new album out. To be honest, I wish it was slower.

Grace Kelly was written after these musicians were trying to mold me into what I should be. I was really angry and so I wrote the song and mailed them the lyrics. They didn't call me back, but two years later it's come full circle.

With all singers, insecurity is your best security. That's why we're such loud people and why we walk all funny. You think, 'Are people interested?' But I think our band has something and they know we don't just put albums out. We do think about it.

I am not going to be dictated to by fans, certainly. I am dictated enough to by my record company to last me a million years.

Honestly, in the music business, it's all about being cool or being the newest thing or being the 'It' person, and I've tried really hard to be what is expected of me or what would be advantageous to my career, and I just reached the point where I said, 'No, I'm an emotional loser. I can't pretend to not care.'

With MTV in the '80s, you made your album but then you needed to use any money you made to create a video - instead of being able to use that money to pay for you and your band to live on while you wrote new songs. So MTV upped the ante of looking for one hit. Conceptual bands who didn't have a hit were going to lose.

We started to overthink things in the Dixie Chicks and do things we thought people wanted us to do.