A lot of the records you buy, there’s nothing you can hold in your hand, it’s all 1’s and 0’s, this digital cloud floating in the ether. but with analog albums, you can hold it in your hand.

What changed our lives forever was when Malcolm had the idea to sell rock ‚n roll records to trendy customers.

We was able to become real successful in the mixtape space.

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.

Classical – perhaps I should say ‚orchestral‘ – music is so digital, so cut up, rhythmically, pitchwise and in terms of the roles of the musicians. It’s all in little boxes. The reason you get child prodigies in chess, arithmetic, and classical composition is that they are all worlds of discontinuous, parceled-up possibilities.

That little Miley Cyrus… she’s like a little Elvis. The kids love her because she’s Hannah Montana, but what people don’t realize about her is she is such a fantastic singer and songwriter. She writes songs like she’s 40 years old!

As hard as it is, as ghetto as it is, hip-hop is pop music. It’s the sound of music getting out of the ghetto, while rock is looking for a ghetto.

The imminent demise of the large record companies as gatekeepers of the world’s popular music is a good thing, for the most part.

I don’t see myself as a pop artist. Like, when you hear ‚pop,‘ you’re like, ‚Oh, bubblegum, jumpy little girly stuff,‘ and I feel like, ‚Uh-uh. That’s not me.‘

Probably the reason it’s a little hard to break away from the album format completely is, if you’re getting a band together in the studio, it makes financial sense to do more than one song at a time. And it makes more sense, if you’re going to all the effort of performing and doing whatever else, if there’s a kind of bundle.

I’m like a rock singer with one-night stands on the road.

Here in England, everyone’s a pop star, innit, whereas in America they believe in the term artist.

Reggaeton is something else – it is part of pop culture. It is something very big that I don’t believe will ever die.

I want to make pop cool again, and the only way I can do that is by being ambitious and grand.

I respect Soulja Boy.

It confuses me and disappoints me when somebody says, ‚What does he do? What does he do?‘ My records are some of the biggest anthems ever. What do you think, they magically just appear? Obama walked out to my record.

I remember talking with Arcade Fire after their first record, when they were getting all kinds of offers from major labels, and I don’t think I gave them any advice. They survived that whole onslaught pretty well anyway without me.

There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.

I think that when you’re making your way up in the music industry, you have all these heroes and the reasons why they are your heroes. As soon as you get into the industry, your guidelines change a little bit. For me, my heroes now are great people first and great artists second.

A development deal is where they’re giving you recording time and money to record, but not promising that they’ll put an album out.

I enjoy being involved in making the artwork for albums and stupid stuff like that.

The wage for most musicians is a modest amount, and that includes me some of the time.

With pop music, the format dictates the form to a big degree. Just think of the pop single. It has endured as a form even in the download age because bands conform to a strict format, and work, often very productively, within the parameters.

I’ve never written a song in my life. It’s all a big hoax.

The music industry is a strange combination of having real and intangible assets: pop bands are brand names in themselves, and at a given stage in their careers their name alone can practically gaurantee hit records.

Music will never go away, and I will never stop making music; it’s just what capacity or what arena you decide to do it.

I think songwriting is the ultimate form of being able to make anything that happens in your life productive.

Stylistically, I love make-up. I love doing my own make-up and stuff, but clothes-wise, I actually didn’t ever really care. Initially the fashion world was more interested in me than the music world, which was strange when I first started singing.

Michael Jordan changed so much in basketball, he took his power to make a difference. It’s so much going on in music right now and somebody has to make a difference.

Over the years I’ve met quite a few big rappers. Then it exploded with 50 Cent, and I did a book with him. It’s always a strange meeting of two worlds, it’s very exciting.

Surface R&B doesn’t work any more. The whole heartthrob thing, songs about unrealistic love and tearing your shirt off every show – that’s not really where it’s at any more. It’s becoming harder for those guys to sell records, and harder for them to succeed.

The only time my records are going to be broken is by my own spawn. I’m going be training that child out the womb.

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.‘

I probably could have toured off ‚Trilogy‘ for the rest of my life. It definitely changed the culture. No one can do a trilogy again without thanking The Weeknd.

I can’t deny that label-support gave me a leg up – though not every successful artist needs it.

No rapper in the world from Jay-Z to Tupac to Biggie has 100 percent love on everything they do.

Music is changing so quickly, and the landscape of the music industry itself is changing so quickly, that everything new, like Spotify, all feels to me a bit like a grand experiment.

In my view, the only thing worse than a rock star is a rock star with a conscience.

There’s more good music being made now than ever before.

Strangely, some songs you really don’t want to write.

There was a time Michael Jackson couldn’t get his video on MTV because he was considered to be ‚urban.‘ The Michael Jackson. So I literally have to be the Michael Jackson of apparel in order to break down the doors for everyone who will come after I’m gone, after I’m dead.

I still have my first paycheck. It was just, I think, a dollar or two that I got when I started as a songwriter with BMI, and I had some songs there that I had through the company, and in the mail I got this big old check for, like, a dollar and a half or something. Somebody had recorded one of my songs.

Rock stars are good at making noise.

I’ve written all my songs on every single one of my records, and that’s what’s been fun about looking back.

With all singers, insecurity is your best security. That’s why we’re such loud people and why we walk all funny. You think, ‚Are people interested?‘ But I think our band has something and they know we don’t just put albums out. We do think about it.

I think country music is popular – has been popular and will always be popular because I think a lot of real people singing about a lot of real stuff about real people. And it’s simple enough for people to understand it. And we kind of roll with the punches.

Because I’m not in a record deal, I don’t have to operate in an album format.

To go indie is a thing. But to put an album in the stores, you need a distribution label.

I wanted to sell a million records, and I sold a million records. I wanted to go platinum; I went platinum. I’ve been working nonstop since I was 15. I don’t even know how to chill out.

I think I have every piece of music Bob Marley ever made.

No one in this world, so far as I know – and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me – has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.

Why not invest in the future of music, instead of building fortresses to preserve its past?

Every album, I make big records. I’m going to always make an anthem. That’s what I do.

I’ve noticed that when I am selling a lot of records, certain things become easier. I’m not talking about getting a table in a restaurant.

A lot of people ask me, ‚How did you have the courage to walk up to record labels when you were 12 or 13 and jump right into the music industry?‘ It’s because I knew I could never feel the kind of rejection that I felt in middle school. Because in the music industry, if they’re gonna say no to you, at least they’re gonna be polite about it.

In pop music, the public usually see the results – the hit records, the Grammy Awards performances, the concert tours – but not all the work that goes into getting into the spotlight. And not everyone realizes that, even if you have a lot of talent, chances are you won’t make it.

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.‘

My records are borderline dance records. They’ve got a real electro-rock heart and soul, and the vibe of the sentiment is pop, but there’s a lot of people that were like, ‚This is a dance record.‘

I love it when people say things to me in public and want to meet me, because I want to meet them! Early on, my manager told me, ‚If you want to sell 500,000 records, then go out there and meet 500,000 people.‘

I seen a lot of artists be hot for a minute, and then that’s it, and somebody else come in.

Madonna and I are very different. Just saying. We’re very different. I wouldn’t make that comparison at all, and I don’t mean to disrespect Madonna: she’s a nice lady, and she’s had a fantastic, huge career – biggest pop star of all time.