Surface R&B doesn't work any more. The whole heartthrob thing, songs about unrealistic love and tearing your shirt off every show - that's not really where it's at any more. It's becoming harder for those guys to sell records, and harder for them to succeed.
Record companies are not necessarily interested in you realizing your artistic dream. The bottom line is that they got to sell records.
Unless I've got Katy Perry on the cover of my CD, it's going to be tough to sell a lot of records.
Back then people closed their eyes and listened to music. Today there's a lot of images that go with the music. A lot of music is crap and it's all commercial and the images are all trying to sell the record.
Bands that say they don't care about how their records sell are liars.
Of course, I want to sell this record - there's no point making it otherwise.
I want to keep making records as long as I can and that's the beginning and end of my concern about selling records.
If I wasn't rapping about politics, then I might have been just another person trying to sell albums, and I might have sounded like everyone else out there.
We're not trying to be a mega-pop-band, but we also wouldn't be opposed to selling millions of records, either.
The label doesn't do anything but put your record in the store, that's all they do. And tell you, you don't have a single... and tell you, it's not gonna sell... that's what the label does.
If there is a good musical reason, I think it might draw more attention and sell, though it is not guaranteed. To make a record without a musical reason, you have to either be a pop star who sells automatically or just be lucky.
When you grow up in the music industry, trying to be Britney Spears because that's what sells records and then you realize, 'All I have to do is be myself? I should have thought of that a long time ago,' it feels good to have success come from what's actually inside of you.
How could they call him wacko? He's sold more records than anybody in history.
I need to reach a lot of people to sell records.
I wanted to get my recording and become a musician again, work; with other people, do that kind of thing because I kind of got away from that for a while once we started happening, you know, selling records, sold out concerts.
I cleaned up my act, and I made this rap thing work for me. I thought people would respect me for that. But instead, it's, 'Oh, he's sold all these records, and now he thinks he's all that.'
