Artist-Label Relationship Quotes

Def Jam, they've shown nothing but love as far as supporting my records. We haven't missed yet, radio-wise, and every song that they've actually tried to support has been No. 1.

Many musicians will say they don't care about the money yet they must commit themselves to appear at given times and places, and to produce what sells, whether they believe in it or not. It depends on contracts.

We'd been on Geffen for a long time, and I think we felt that we needed a change. I just don't think we felt very close to the people at the label after all this time or that they understood what we were trying to do. I don't have any regrets, because at the time we signed with Geffen, it was the right thing to do.

I actually re-signed with Warner Bros. on my own. They've been really good to us and all the people over there are great; they love me and I love them. So I'm just sticking with them.

My experience with being on a record label over the years has been when both of your agendas are in sync, and they're the same goal, it's great to have another army of people and resources and money. But most of the time, they're not the same. Their agenda is just simply to sell plastic discs at any cost, and yours is to preserve - at least in my case - your integrity, and hopefully sell some plastic discs, too.

I'd only do a deal with a label if it allowed me to still be indie and have that indie mentality. I have to have creative control.

I've pretty much run the circle of labels and dealing with that whole kind of battle, because you're the one creating the music, but you're not the final say. That's always been hard.

You don't want the biggest record deal as far as money goes, you just want to make sure that the people at the label really support your band and the music and stuff.

It's always push and pull with a record company.

I am not going to be dictated to by fans, certainly. I am dictated enough to by my record company to last me a million years.

Technically, at this point we're no longer with the label; we've fulfilled our contract.

When you record for a label, they own that material in perpetuity, meaning that they can release, chose not to release , or repackage it any way they so choose... with or without the permission of the artist.

Giving a record company an album is like giving a gangster your baby or something.

I think for us, we don't feel like the future of music is in the act of being a record company. We feel like the future of the music business is in empowering artists to have better and better tools to communicate with their fans. We want to be people who are saying to artists, "Look, you don't need that company over there to release your album. You can do it this way." Almost more of a band partnership than a label-artist relationship. Not about ownership of content, but about empowerment.

It was a lot easier to write songs before I had a record deal, because the record labels and the industry doesn't mean to put pressure on you, but they do. They don't realize that they are, but you end up having a pressure there that you feel. At times I feel myself wanting to say, 'Just let me do what I do.'

The internet has not granted us more control in relation to the record company because we're still bound by an agreement with them not to release our music without their consent. But they generally let us do what we want, anyway, so it doesn't matter who's officially in control.

I got out of the business because I went from being the biggest artist on my record label to someone they didn't even want to have around.

When you're signed to a big label you're always in the position of convincing them, especially now because labels are barely keeping the lights on, so getting them to spend a little bit of money is really hard.

You go through periods of times where bands are calling the shots, and then sometimes, you've got the record companies calling the shots. I think it has to be a bit of both to make the thing work.

The fact of the matter is, if you're not putting out stuff that people are feeling, then your record label doesn't mean a goddamn thing.