Radio Play, Radio Playing Quotes

Steve Earle had a mainstream career. Dwight Yoakam had a mainstream career. Willie Nelson did. But they always made good music, they always stuck to who they were. They weren't relying on radio like a lot of people are in Nashville.

I know how to make a record that commercial radio or Triple J will smash now... It's kind of hard to stay true and write what you would write if you didn't have that in your head. Because I know I can get way more airplay and get this much bigger... and that's what I'm trying to avoid doing. Trying to avoid the poisons of success.

When the first record came out, I'd go down to radio stations pretty much every day to get the record played, and I would walk in and they'd tell us how much they loved the record, but they weren't sure how much they could play it because they were already playing a girl.

People got to know us from hearing us live because there wasn't much publicity or radio airplay for a long time.

I'm a musician, I always was a musician, and now I've got a song on the radio, so I'm definitely a musician.

We never said we were hard-core or that we didn't want our music crossing over or being popular.

I got my influences from '70s bands - Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, blah blah blah. When I was growing up, we had all these crazy bands on the Top 40. Today, if Pink Floyd released 'Money,' it wouldn't even get played.

When I say I don't have to write pop songs anymore, there's no way I'm going to get on the radio at 60 years of age unless I'm doing a duet with Gaga or I was on 'All of the Lights,' which was a Kanye West record that managed to get on the radio.

You can tell if something feels special. But there are so many moving parts involved in making the song a hit. The radio has to deliver, the management has to deliver in terms of booking the right promotions... just being a good song isn't enough.

'Reflection' and 'Going Nowhere' would've been great singles because that's the exact sound that we wanted to achieve.

The success of 'Take Me To Church,' I never imagined it. I never imagined that it would work on radio, that it would find its way onto the charts, even at home and certainly not in America.

I don't feel I'm making a conscious effort to go more commercial.

I don't want to focus too much on trying to write a song for radio.

At one time they've been the most important thing to me. So I can't hear our records on the radio, I can't stand it, because they sound so out of what everyone else is doing.

The first time I wrote a song, I couldn't really believe - 'Can you just do that? You're just allowed?' I never thought about songs on the radio and who wrote them.

The only difference between The Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Aerosmith, and Chubby Checker is that they get their music played on the radio.

I was frustrated in the past, like, 'Wow, why do they have to throw me in the R&B urban adult contemporary lane?' 'Woman' was a no. 1 hit at Urban AC, so there's no disrespect to that lane. But did it get a fair shot at urban radio? No, I don't think so.

If you want to put out a million CDs and sell them and get them played on the radio, and even videos, or whatever, if that still exists, that kind of muscle can only come from a label like Columbia.

The success of the first album was almost an anomaly, and it could remain a fantastic anomaly. It was not crafted for commercial success. I remember meetings with my label saying it had no radio singles. For me, the second album was a gesture of independence.

They were worried we wouldn't get any radio play at all[ for "A Deal with God" ]. That's why it was changed [to "Running Up That Hill"].

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.

I feel like the U.K. is a better breeding ground for pop, partially because the radio play is more broad and open to new ideas and sounds.

I like to write sad songs. They're much easier to write and you get a lot more emotion into them. But people don't want to hear them as much. And radio definitely doesn't; they want that positive, uptempo thing.

The last thing we want is for radio to say that they can't afford to play our artists and turn off the pipe.

Lilith Fair was a great experience for us the first time we played it. We were... not a new band, but a new band as far as mainstream kind of airplay or success.