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

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

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

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

I think we’re about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world.

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.

Rock stars are good at making noise.

I have taken taking my music to labels for years, and everyone just thought it was creepy. They thought the images with the music were weird and verging on psychotic.

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.

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

It must be quite mysterious to some people why I bother to carry on. Because, you know, I don’t sell that many records.

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.

In 2013, the week before I dropped ‚Crenshaw,‘ ‚Complex‘ wrote an article that said that Nipsey Hussle is one of the top 25 underperforming artists. I was so offended that I responded with my own opinion about these journalists – their point of view is not validated in our culture.

Pop music will never be low brow.

Looking at 2014, I look back: we made more money off ‚Mailbox Money‘ than we would have made off taking an advance from anybody. We made more money letting our fans buy the stuff directly from us than what any label could have offered us.

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.

Apple has given me a platform to spread music. They’re giving us Latinos a chance to shine.

Even before Snapchat, you go back into my career from Day One or interview people that knew me for 25 years, they’re going to tell you I’ve been DJ Khaled my whole life.

Streaming is a really big market for me. We’ve been doing great in the streaming market, so it’s not something I want to alienate at all. Streaming counts now. They’re treating artists the way we deserve to be treated.

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.

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.

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 put together amazing records, whether that’s finding the beat or putting the right hook on there, and picking the right artists on the record. That’s me being an A&R. And I’m making sure that they give me their best.

Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left.

I feel like I write so that people can think of it as theirs. If my song is exactly about your life right now, then it is – I don’t even want to say that it’s mine, because it’s yours.

I think Ye is important to hip-hop.

Working with J Balvin has undoubtedly been an unparalleled experience.

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

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!

I’m not going to do anything crazy, but I want to do music that I’m passionate about. I’m finally at an age where I can do the music that I grew up loving, which was urban pop, ’90s music. I grew up listening to the divas, so I’m very happy to finally do urban pop. I hope that it’s received well, and it has been so far.

And God help Bruce Springsteen when they decide he’s no longer God… They’ll turn on him, and I hope he survives it.

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.

The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.

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.‘

The stores and the things like that, the business side of things came out at the point when, I’d say probably in the early ’70s, it looked like the year of the singer-songwriter was over, ‚cause music changed in our time and the spotlight was out.

There’s been a lot of talk about Jack White wanting to work with me, and I’ve always admired him, and of course, he lives in Nashville, too.

In hip-hop, there’s not a lot of love. There’s not a lot of love being spread. It’s always like ‚I’m stuntin‘ on you raps, or I’m better than you raps.‘ It’s not a lot of ‚Yo man, I idolize you raps.‘

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 think generally playing live is a crap idea. So much of stage work is the presentation of personality, and I’ve never been interested in that.

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

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

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.

I need to know how many records I’ve sold, how many album equivalents from streaming, which territories are playing my music more than others, because it helps me in conversations about where we’re gonna be playing shows or where I might open a retail location, like a pop-up store or something.

Ever since the beginning of rock and roll, there’s been an Axl Rose. And it’s just boring. It’s totally boring to me.

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

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.

Say there’s a white kid who lives in a nice home, goes to an all-white school, and is pretty much having everything handed to him on a platter – for him to pick up a rap tape is incredible to me, because what that’s saying is that he’s living a fantasy life of rebellion.

If I could, I would not do anything else. I’d just be in the studio for my whole life. I would never go to parties, events, and red carpets. I would rather just be in the studio for the whole time. I don’t even care. Nobody has to know what I look like. I just want to make music.

All I do is make music.

Now I realize that from ’72 through to about ’76, I was the ultimate rock star. I couldn’t have been more rock star.

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.

I’ve never thought about any kind of prejudice about women in country music because I never felt like it affected me. I was fortunate enough to come about in a time when I didn’t feel that kind of energy at all, and it was always my theory that if you want to play in the same ballgame as the boys, you’ve got to work as hard as them.

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

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

I made that first record in 2008, alongside the EP, but my label at the time waited three years to release it. They thought maybe someone bigger would buy it, but they didn’t, so in the end they just released it themselves.

Cardi B put a lot of work in.

Basically, I’m one of the greatest producers ever. And I’m also one of the greatest DJs ever. And I’m also one of the best executives ever.

To me, the most important artists in my career are Arcangel and Balvin. Arcangel gave me the push, the respect in the streets.

Super-envious of the fact that Daft Punk can wear robot helmets and be one of the most famous bands in the world, while also understanding that will never be my situation.

When you’re a pop star, it’s a little conservative; you always have to stay in a box. You have fans that are five and fans that are 65; there are so many people wanting so many things.