Record Label Quotes

I’ve been an educator all my life pretty much. It’s important as a manager and also as a record label, to educate your artists on public speaking, how to build that connection, how to communicate effectively, to have a general working knowledge of the music industry.

I’m developing artists for my new record label, my son’s band, Intangible, being one of them.

I run a whole record label, I’m a whole entrepreneur.

Friends of friends had bands in college or in their early 20s and had a moment where they had some kind of interest from a record label or manager. It’s always interesting how people handle those decisions and those moments.

I know a lot of people who jumped into a record label right away, dropped an album, and then nothing happened for them. Build your fan base first, and follow your gut.

I wanted to play in bands and get signed by a record label and tour the world and stuff, but that never really worked out.

If you ever want to know why I’m not on a record label, look at ‘The X Factor!’ Honestly, of all the people that strive to break barriers in music and do good things and write great lyrics, not one of them would ever pass the first round on any of these competitions.

I’ve had big record label presidents look me in the face and say, ‘Your music sucks, you don’t know who you are, your music is all over the place, and we don’t know how to market this stuff. Pick a lane and come back to us.’

Remember the Stax label and how if you liked one record, you liked all the others as well? You don’t talk to a lot of people who tell you how much they love their record label. I don’t care how many records they sell.

I want to invest and have my own record label and artists. I want to have a business where my kids, kids, kids will still have something going on long after I’m gone.

I want to record many albums, have a healthy record label with talented artists, keep building my publishing catalogue, and maintain our culture with good music that will be remembered for years to come.

I went from the most underground band in the world to signing with Madonna’s producer and a record label that is extremely mainstream – it was interesting.

Commercial success still hasn’t come to an artist that isn’t signed to a record label. There are very few artists that can succeed without the help of a record label. The role of the record label is still required, it’s still necessary.

I just have so much love for my record label.

I’m not only a DJ. I run my own record label and I work out of my own productions.

I still stand behind the stuff I did early on, but I was on a record label, and I didn’t have a lot of creative control. Another side of that is just being young and having bad taste. There was plenty of that, too.

When I first heard ‘Let Me Love You,’ I knew immediately it was going to be a hit. I believed in it and I had to literally force it down the throats of his record label, who weren’t believers at first.

Swishahouse, it started off as just a crew making mixtapes and that’s when I got down with it back in like 1998. It wasn’t a record label at first. It was all just for promotion, for fun, and we just had a crew representin’ for our hood.

Shoot, there’s a committee to tell you everything at a record label. You definitely have to know who you are if you want to look like you at the end of the process. We’ve all seen people get record contracts, and by the time they’re spit out by the machine, we don’t even recognize them.

You no longer have to have a big record label behind you and have to kowtow to the politics that enabled you to get there. You can be a phenomenal artist and put your stuff out there on YouTube and find yourself becoming a star.

I made this record without a record label.

When I did the record, I was coming off a time when my contract had been sold and the music industry had changed a lot. I didn’t understand how to make records for big labels. I was waiting for a new kind of record label to emerge.

You can be more creative when you’re not feeling like a slave. When you’re on a record label, they have you like that.

I don’t get involved in record label politics.

I figured it out at a young age: I could meet as many young people online and try to form my own family or my own record label group.

My style when I was 17 was very low-key with jeans, T-shirts, and Converse. I was signed to a major record label by then, so I had stylists helping me.

I hate how I’ve had the mantle set on my shoulders as being against the record label. We’ve had some issues, but that is the nature of business.

Ever since I was a little kid, I wanted to start a record label.

I want to have a publishing company and a record label, and I want to manage five artists… eventually.

People are like, ‘Wow you started your own record label,’ and treat me like I’m some sort of innovative genius, when I’m not at all. You’ve got the Internet and music – you put them together, and people hear your music.

I just think that any person who wants music to be their career shouldn’t focus on a record label. I have seen friends who sign to a label too early in their career, and they lost control over their music, and their releases were delayed or never put out.

I did my first album with my own record label.

At some of my earliest shows, we used to roll up 20 deep – if my mates can’t come in, I can’t come in. My record label couldn’t understand it: plus-19 on the guestlist?! But that was how it was. Over the years – as it is with everyone, but amplified from being in the public – it’s got smaller and smaller.

However, the radio and national media depend much more on the hype from a good record label, and from a ‘ buzz ‘ about a band, then from just one or two good shows. There are a lot of artists that have a ton of good press going for them, and still do not make it big in the US.

Originally, after ‘Tambourine’ came out, another record was supposed to come out, but I had issues with my record label at the time, which was Interscope. We couldn’t agree on a record, so that took some time. I had to leave them and find a new label.

There’s this idea of a star, and this person is very aloof and writes all the music, and they don’t talk to anyone unless they go through the record label. And I always felt very uncomfortable about that.

We have meetings with our record label to tell them how to market us.

When I got my first email from a record label, I decided I didn’t want to go in with just one song, so I sat down and kept on writing.

If I was rich enough, I would love to launch my own record label. I would love to try and give all my musically talented friends a start in the industry.

I tried to work with a record label; I tried to work with a booking agency, variety shows. I went to Vegas. I just tried everything I could think of, and nothing took. No one thought there was a place for my style and my music; it was just too different.

I’m from Israel, so America has no limits. I started a record label, and then I started managing other artists, like Liza Minelli.

Generally, when a record label suggests album ideas for you, you smile politely, and then proceed to shoot it down, because it’s never what you as an artist feel is right for you.

I think I’m a living embodiment of, ‘Don’t try to push me around or squash me,’ whether its how I talk to a record label or in my relationships.

When I first started out in the music industry and went to Elektra Records, I didn’t go to be an artist, I went to get a record label started. And they said in order to have a label deal, I had to be an artist – so that’s what I did.

If you’re making a film about a band or a songwriter or whomever, there’s a publisher, there’s a record label, and there are people who are vested interests in that film. But with back-up singers, because they did stuff for everybody, there’s no one party that has any vested interest in seeing the story told.

I have no friends here apart from the dudes at my record label, and I didn’t go to school with no one. Nobody knows me – I’m incognito. It’s all new, all fun.

I’ve started my own record label – Jeepney Music – and I want to put out my own stuff and also stuff by other Filipino artists.

I have an independent record label called Favored Nations on which I released an album by an artist called Johnny A, who plays an arch top Gibson through a Marshall, but the tone is all in his fingers.

My allegiance was always to the act. I wanted them to be happy. I wasn’t owned by a magazine or a record label. And I was a very naughty boy to boot!

I have a day job Monday to Friday. I work at a record label in Brooklyn called Ba Da Bing. It’s a great indie label and I listen to music all day. I meet people online and find out about the cool new music blogs.

I’ve always had a love for poetry and when I got signed to a record label I thought, ‘How odd that I’m doing a record before a book of poetry,’

Island Records was the first record label to… acknowledge me. After that, quickly, Republic Records, and then Atlantic Records, Sony Records and Warner Bros. It was all the labels at once. It was absolutely insane, like, knowing that this many record labels were interested in me.

When you don’t have a record label and you have been on your own as we have, you can look at all these other ways you can get in touch with other people and get music out there again.

All of my songwriting success happened within a four month time span, and my record label deal happened within the next three months.

I had heard all the rumors and controversy swirling about the ‘In Utero’ recordings – there was a lot of, ‘Oh, the record label hates it,’ it was going to ruin the band, that kind of stuff.

At my second record label, they told me and other female artists that some of us were going on the chopping block. I was 19… and it was devastating.

After we wrote The Wreckoning, our record label did listen.

I’m lucky enough to exist in 2018, where I have a record label that’s like, ‘Write whatever you want to write.’ I don’t have to hide anything.

At 18, I finally came into a relationship with a record label. My family got back on its feet. I was happy.

I’d been doing my own thing, and making my own money; I wasn’t built by a record label or the music industry, nor was I built by prominent artists that have given me co-signs.

Well, we were originally called Huey Lewis and the American Express. But on the eve of the release of our first record, our record label, Chrysalis Records was afraid that we’d be sued by American Express.

I bring in the record label who distributes the music.

I got a record label and I got a couple artists signed. All of them got real-deal.

If you have good songs and a real desire to make music, the next thing to do, instead of approach record companies, is to get yourself a really good manager because then it allows you to focus on your profession of being a musician. Then they can focus on the darker art of the record label and the music industry.

So you have to just be really careful and make sure that when a deal comes along, that it’s like the right deal for you… not necessarily the most money, because you have to pay the record label that back in like record sales and stuff.

Mark Ronson was a dear friend through family and through growing up in New York, being in that scene, and Mark came to a show and really liked it and asked us to join his record label Allido records, or ‘all I do’ records, and that was sort of a development deal.

I wanted to raise my kids to be strong, independent and follow their dreams and be themselves and make choices based on what they want not what the press, management or a record label or I don’t care who it is… you stick to what you want and you be who you are and be proud of it.

The opportunity to record the song came when Phil Collins’ record label, Atlantic, was doing a tribute album to him and they asked all these different artists to do renditions of his songs.

I once worked at a record label called London Records. The company was owned by Roger Ames, one of the most successful figures in the British music industry. Roger always placed a value on loafing, on holidays, on not being in the office all the time.

I heard the Bloc Party record Japan before it came out in the UK as they are on the V2 record label. I think it has a great vibe and has great songs. I also think the Kings of Leon are right up my street.

I’ve been trying to do this music stuff and work it out for so long… I was like, ‘Let’s do it for ourselves.’ All these songs, we’ve travelled the world – no record label, nothing. We just did this for us, but the love is very appreciated.

John Peel made his reputation with his radio show and his record label, Dandelion, by championing the underdog.

We were all friends who formed a band. We weren’t auditioned or put together by a record label, management company or TV show.

Even though I haven’t released a song since 2010, I have still performed, so I don’t feel I have been completely away from music. I have been away on a mainstream level, of course. But releasing a single this way – on my own independent record label – is more fun.

I’ve made sure that in any situation and with any record label, I’m allowed to write my own music.

Being in a band is very much like a startup. You start in a garage. You hope to get interest from investors, like a major record label.

A record is a commodity, but so is a hamburger. Just because I work at McDonald’s doesn’t mean I reap the benefits of that commodity. That’s the reality with most artists in the record industry: They’re getting paid a subsistence wage so they can keep producing a commodity for the record label.

I think the people at my record label know I’m a Christian and again, I’ve been really blessed that I’ve never had to get into a head-butt war over moral standards or anything like that.

I’d done recordings, little demos, since I was in college, which I used to get gigs. But I never thought I’d have a record label.

I started my own record label.

I’ve been doing my record label for 15 years called Dim Mak. I started my label when I was 19 in ’96. I started putting out an eclectic roster of artists. In 2003, we found a band called Bloc Party, and in 2004, we started getting remixes for Bloc Party, and at the same time I was throwing Dim Mak parties in Los Angeles.

When I first was a part of ‘The Monster,’ I really wanted to put it out under my name, but no record label thought it was good enough – until Eminem liked it.

When you’re 17 and a record label says, ‘Hey, do pop,’ you listen.

I’ve started a little independent record label called ‘Six String Productions’ and recorded a couple of tunes, and I hope to do some more with some future artists next year. It’s a real passion project of mine.

When Alcatrazz played in Japan in early ’84, the record label offered me the opportunity to do a solo album while continuing to play in the band. I wanted the whole album to have vocals, but the record company didn’t want that. Initially, the album was released solely in Japan.

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.

When you find fame, or you get signed to a record label, it’s not what you imagined – because you imagined they would have 100 percent trust or faith in you as an artist. Unfortunately, that’s not really the case – it’s what sells.

Singing is my favorite thing to do. One day, I hope to get signed to a record label.