In a sense, the music business and I haven’t always been the best of bedfellows. Artists often have to fight their corner. Your music goes through these filters of record labels and media, and you’re hoping you’ll find someone who’ll help you get your work into the world.
I’m a binge writer. I work in the music business fulltime, in artist management and developing songwriters and recording artists, and so juggling my job I carve out as much time as I can on the weekends.
Success came to me in my late 20s. I started touring when I was a teenager, so I had already seen the good, the bad, and the ugly side of the music business. Plus, setting up my own record company taught me a lot.
The film business, for me, has been great, but the music business, we’ve always been on the outside looking in.
If everyone in the music business were brutally honest about what their intentions were then you could sort things out, but it’s all smoke and mirrors.
We were kids that didn’t have any education. None of our parents were in the music business or even college graduates. We didn’t have someone guiding us. We were just uneducated kids from the middle of nowhere that suddenly had a band going around the world.
In the music business, if you’re not a fighter, you will get walked all over.
To be honest, when you grow up in the music business, people heard me sing from a young age, and you get offered development deals and things like that.
I attended a post-college program in L.A. for Music Business and Production. Took several courses involving Music Production, Arrangement, and Songwriting.
The ‘music industry’ is not a term I use. I tend to concentrate on music, and the music business is something different.
I think it’s a reflection of the music business in general, which to me seems very fragmented.
The thing that happened with the music business, there are no stores anymore where you can buy music. It’s all an online business now, and that’s, you know – the bookstore culture is a very vibrant part of the American experience that we’re very reluctant to see go away.
It might take some here and there, but Apple’s market share in the global computer business has really shrunk pretty far, and where they’ve been making success recently is not in the computer business but in the iPod music business.
Before I went into the music business I wanted to be a surgeon.
The music business doesn’t take up that much of my time. I probably should put a little more energy into it.
For starters, I wanted to do an acting role in a movie that had nothing to do with the music business or in which I would play a singer or a songwriter. When I act, I don’t even want to be thought of as Ne-Yo.
Getting back to the point, a guy like Jerry, he deals with the business, and he doesn’t see it as being evil or ugly, it’s what you have to do, and I mean I know there’s some really ugly parts to it and parts which drive me nuts, but not in the same way as music business.
A lot of people in the music business are a bit doom and gloom, People say it’s probably easier to write sad songs than it is to write happy ones, so that’s maybe why. I just wanted to be a bit positive about things rather than always being negative.
When the music business failed to embrace the Internet, I thought it was game, set and match for the industry, and I quit.
I think musicians and artists are the most philanthropic people I know. Their charity record of the music business would hold up to the work of anybody.
As for the music business itself, the key things have not changed that much. It operates like any business and money still keeps things moving.
I wish the music business was a much easier thing, but you know what? Nothing easy is worth anything. So it is what it is. There comes a time when things can work out and everybody can be happy. And that’s what it’s all about in the end – everybody being happy and working it out.
The ’60s was a magical time in the music business. So much creativity and talent. I think a lot of it came from the fact that we had grown up before rock n’ roll. We listened to all the great songwriters and big bands, songs with great lyrics and melodies. I think that really influenced everybody.
The tricky thing is music is supposed to be very mysterious; the way it’s made is mysterious. Then people like to get upset with the music business.
I love what I do. I made my first record in ’57. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of making records and writing songs and singing and being in the music business.
Some people are the greatest people on Earth with good hearts and will get in the studio and make the most negative music in the world for the sake of success. That’s what the music business does to you. That’s what capitalism does to you.
When I left Genesis, I just wanted to be out of the music business. I felt like I was just in the machinery. We knew what we were going to be doing in 18 months or two years ahead. I just did not enjoy that.
All movies, when they’re about the music business, tend to have a bit of a wide latitude in terms of how things really were.
I’m in the music business for one purpose – to make money.
My lifelong friend and mentor Frank Barsalona is gone. And the music business as we knew it went with him.
Swimming upstream in the music business is a hard thing to do.
Pop music I have always loved best. But the more extreme, fascist-led examples of the music business I tend to detest the most.
It’s called the music business. We’ve all gone into it ’cause we love the music, and a lot of people end up with nothing at the end of the day, after they’ve done all of this great music, ’cause they never learned any of the business side.
As a child, I was always very interested in music and had friends who were in the music business. I kind of accidentally fell into it and loved it. There was no reason not to – it was a great career.
If I couldn’t get to where I wanted to by being my organic self – which is a smart, funny, unapologetically black woman – then I felt like it’s not worth doing it if I can’t do it the most organic way possible. Which is why I left the music business.
In the music business, we all do different things, but we sit there and admire other people who can write a song differently or sing differently. It’s not so competitive.
I have major respect for Kenny Chesney and Carrie Underwood and Sugarland. They are wonderful. They’re superstars in the music business.
I got very bored with the music business.
That folk music led to learning to play, and making things up led to what turns out to be the most lucrative part of the music business – writing, because you get paid every time that song gets played.
I didn’t get into the music business because somebody made me take piano lessons, you know. I got into music because I was a natural writer and had a lot of curiosity about sound.
There’s also, I think more so in the music business and especially for women, this ceiling that people put on you if you have children or a family and decide to spend time with them.
By 1969, when I celebrated 45 years in the music business, I also had 45 people in our musical family.
Now bands have to sing live, now people watch who sings on the record, now people want to hear the real music and not just plastic bands anymore. So I think we changed the music business to a better, more honest way.
I’ll tell you what bothers me. This music business is so crazy. They think everything is a game, or everything is a fad or trend to win. I see people saying, ‘My next album is going to be my honest album, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, my deepest secrets, the soundtrack to my life.’
Things can turn ugly so quickly in the music business, especially if you have an unexpected success.
The music business is filled with some nice people but a lot of strange people, so when you come across someone who’s really genuine at an environment as bizarre as an awards show, you typically gravitate to them.
Growing up in Nashville, especially in a music business family, means growing up with knowledge that seems like common sense until later in life when you realize people spend thousands of dollars a semester trying to learn or pretending to learn while looking for some intern job on music row.
I’d fired anyone who was involved with Creed. I didn’t want anything to do with the music business. The entire press and industry hated me, so what was the point?
I don’t relate to what’s left of the music business. There doesn’t seem to be any point to it anymore. The business that I grew up in and loved, we made records a different way – there were record companies, there were stores where you could buy albums.
When I was 20, I thought anyone in the music business over 25 is past it. Then at 30, you think anyone still doing it at 35 is ridiculous. Suddenly, you find yourself at 48 and still doing it, so I don’t know what to say, really.
There’s a lot to live up to when three of your parents are successful in the music business.
I came into this music business at 26 years old. I was a fully developed man at that point. At that age, I didn’t have anything to prove.
I was always a singer. But I was always focused on being an actor as my trade. Music I do just for me. The movie business is very difficult but the music business is just impossible.
I know a lot of people in the music business who came from working-class backgrounds and they vote Tory.
