Matthew Sweet Quotes

I started my music career at 18 and for a long while I let other people handle my affairs.

When I finished Westlife, we had - Louie Walsh is still managing me - I was lucky to have options from different labels such as Sony and Universal. When we met Capitol and Nick Raphael, I just believed in them the most, and it looked like they believed in me the most.

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.

We are meeting with Sony, and we have a couple of other labels that suddenly have interest and that's really great because none of them have actually heard our stuff.

Coming into the business, you'd pass through these little agencies until you got to understand what was happening in the business, unless you were really able to have a style strong enough to go directly to the publishers.

I'm overly excited to finally announce this amazing global partnership deal back home with EMI Music. I know I have mentioned doing music in the past but for legal reasons I was not in a position to release any new music.

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.

You think publishing is tough but the music world is ten times tougher.

Doing things in my day was simple: you either signed to a big label or you signed to a very small label, and you worked with that one, and then they eventually signed you on to a big one.

The Philadelphia/New York world of the music business is a tough place to be.

I love music and musicians. And seeing great artists dropped from labels was really frustrating and sad to me.

I'm an indie artist with major distribution, so one foot in the extreme major music business and one foot in the abyss of indie artists.

With the new ways of getting music out, you don't need a label if you're a legacy artist.

I am a singer first and foremost. I was lucky enough to have a manager, when I was 15, who knew the heads of a lot of record labels at the time.

You rarely get money out of labels, except for when they open up a budget for a project. Other than that, it's a do-or-die type thing.

The ideal situation would be to bypass all of the drama and mayhem and just get the music right to the people. I'm confident that we'll eventually figure it out.

I like Rick Ross as a person. I like Jay-Z and Kanye West as people. But I hate the companies that they record for.

I certainly have gotten caught up in the music business at various times in my life, mostly because you want to get along with whatever record company you're dealing with. I don't want to be flaky. I don't want to be some temperamental, hard-to-work-with musician.

Artists were nurtured back in the '70s. Their music was developed by the record companies.

Actually, I have another record I made with them in 1976, but I've had such a bad experience with record companies, because I keep my head so much in music and not in business.

My passion is music, you know, and music influences culture, influences lifestyle, which leads me to 'Roc-A-Wear'. I was forced to be an entrepreneur, so that led me to be CEO of 'Roc-A-Fella' records, which lead to Def Jam.

I'm really excited because Interscope is really focused on artists. They've been working side by side with me creatively and allowing me to make a lot of the creative decisions, which you don't always hear about. That's why I didn't want to sign originally with a major label.

I never had to ask Def Jam for anything.

I just wanted to have my own dynasty. I wanted my own Cash Money or Roc-A-Fella. Outside of that, I also wanted my own media company.

We've been lucky. Even as a young, local-level band, we were able to rise out of the local scene without having any debt, without having signed the wrong deal with the wrong manager or the wrong booker or a small label.