They say the music you listen to in your formative years stays with you and leaves an impression for the rest of your life. For me, the things that I fell in love with happened in the '70s, when artists were nurtured by record companies and it wasn't about singles.
I truly believe, as an institution, most major labels should just die.
In the Seventies, album artwork became really beautiful items. The whole process of doing an album sleeve, it became a very artistic thing.
Good bands won't get famous anymore unless they get really lucky.
There's no problem with fans and bands. There's a problem with the economics of the outside disruption of the industry.
I don't believe in the philosophy of stumbling across hit records.
Back when we were first making records, you didn't just make the music, you put a great deal of energy into the way it looked, and every word that was written on the whole thing.
I think the music business is as crass and as unrewarding as it has ever been.
In the beginning, if you look at those early label albums of the Chicks, we didn't write all that much. We had an A&R person and they were getting songs from publishers, listening to hours and hours of cassette tapes.
I just have to sell enough records to continue financing making more records.
Charts and learning the politics behind making a record - it's pretty soulless.
I hate the industry even more now, no bands get nurtured anymore. Labels only spend money promoting acts they know will be Top Ten. I find it offensive spending $2 million on a video.
Knowing record labels and knowing the kinds of things they would object to-they just object to everything that's interesting.
I never do releases to try and make or break some contemporary band.
I think that's the problem in a lot of music. We've got these record labels.
There are people who are genetically made to start record labels, and I'm not one of those people. People just have it in their blood and are good at it. Corey Rusk from Touch and Go and Ian MacKaye. These are people who have made their own labels.
One of the central flaws in the state of contemporary music is that the major record companies have failed to incorporate that simple fact into their business plans. They've come into an industry that's based on idiosyncratic artists and tried to erase every idiosyncratic aspect out of it.
Everything around a writer, or musician in the record business, probably everything in all the United States or in all of western civilization, is about competition.
I think we have to bottom out. When the studios jump out of the ring, perhaps the artist can get back in.
I don't get involved in record label politics.
I always had these big records with people who were relatively unknown.
I thought that the music industry was going to be pretty easy - getting features and stuff - and everyone was going to be nice. But I realized that it's really, really hard to get features.
I always knew I wanted to create original material, and after having meetings with all sorts of record labels, I decided that Sony was the right place to do it. They knew what I wanted to make and gave me the freedom to express myself.
Holland is a really small country, but with a very strong club and festival scene. Dance music has been huge in Holland since the late eighties. So there were a lot of opportunities for producers and DJs to release records and play live.
My mom had early rap records, like Jimmy Spicer. In the middle of the records was a turntable and a receiver - I used to scratch records on it - and on top was a reel-to-reel. In front of that wall were more stacks of records. It was either Mom's record or Pop's record, and they had their names on each and every one.
