Music Industry Bias Quotes

People are people, and I get a bit annoyed that the music business only focuses in on the big metropolises. I find that people that don't live in big cities are just as likely to enjoy music as people that do live in big cities.

Good singing is learning how to transmit learning musical information with your voice in a way that everybody can relate to. But as a woman you just get a lot of criticism because everyone sees you like a raw lump of clay that needs some help.

When I started out rapping, I became very frightened by the idea that people were trying to pigeonhole me. That's usually what happens to most female rappers. They fit in a box and there's a prototype or person they're compared to.

Does the Grammys intentionally use artists for their celebrity, popularity, and cultural appeal when they already know the winners and then program a show against this expectation? Meanwhile, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences hides behind the 'peer' voting system to escape culpability for not even rethinking its approach.

I'm aware that if I make a country album and release it, and it gets on the Grammys, the Grammys are going to put it in the Urban category. Just my blackness automatically sets it in there.

I think women in pop have been declawed and defanged, and they're just meant to look pretty and sing pretty. You don't really hear a female perspective on the radio, because so many of the songs are being written by men.

What's wrong with hip-hop is the system that controls the definition of it. There needs to be more balance on the airwaves.

I know that there are going to be people that don't like my music, but I think in the industry itself it is always that, 'Oh. you're from the 'X Factor.' There have been certain radio stations that will not play your song because you are from the 'X Factor,' yet they'll play another song from an artist from another TV show.

I'm well past the age where I'm acceptable. You get to a certain age and you are forbidden access. You're not going to get the kind of coverage that you would like in music magazines, you're not going to get played on radio and you're not going to get played on television. I have to survive on word of mouth.

People always say, 'There are plenty of black country artists out there! There is Charley Pride! Darius Rucker!' That's all they can name. They don't understand what we go through, and a lot of people who are fans of traditional country music, as they call it, look at us and aren't going to say, 'Y'all like country music.'

I found it to be kind of ironic, because I’m white, therefore I’m appropriating culture, but then Eminem won it - who’s white and won it many times - and they didn’t seem to say anything about that. I suspect it was just because they dislike me.

I mean, there's plenty of artists who are making R&B music, but because of their ethnicity, it's considered something else.

They wouldn't play my records on American radio because I had spiky hair. They said, 'Punk rock doesn't sell advertising, it won't make any money.'

It's probably easier for rappers as far as a respect level. 'Cause with singers, the powers that be tend to feel that we're stupid.

One of the reasons I didn't ever pursue a career - in the music world if you're black or mixed, you need to be able to belt a song or else you're not a singer, you know?

I basically get stereotyped a lot in terms of being a girl and writing 'chick' music for teenage girls or something. I think, if anything, the press kind of, because of my gender and my age, tends to kind of relegate my work to this sort of special-interest group. It's part of the cultural dynamic, I guess.

You don't see a lot of black rock stars. The music industry tends to be segregated stylistically. It's hard for a black artist to cross over to rock music.

I always think it's a little bit of a challenge when people sort of associate female artists as their own genre.

I think that because we have these big female pop stars, people forget that women and marginalized people are so underrepresented in this business.

Women's music is underrepresented.

There is not enough faith in black music at a high level.

When I tried to get a record deal, only one label wanted me. The rest said 'oh, we've already got a girl with a guitar.' Can you imagine them ever saying that to a guy?

I think women are taught in the music industry that once you're 35, you've expired, and I'm here to prove that factually incorrect.

I remember auditioning for record labels and having them tell me, 'Well, the country-radio demographic is the thirty-five-year-old female housewife. Give us a song that relates to the thirty-five-year-old female, and we'll talk.'

I am one of the few composers who has been lucky enough to manage to do songs with female singers, despite the labels and producers wanting otherwise. They don't believe that songs with female voices can work and often push us to work with male singers.