Thursday, November 01, 2007

Marinate...

This is a new section where i will share some quotes that through one way or another have stuck with me

good ol' adages, anedocotes, questionable comments, far fetched tales...

the great debate is here and your comments are welcomed...

My first peice to marinate on is from a recent interview carried out by Origins Media with London bred David Miller who is currently VP of international marketing at Atlantic Records and now lives in NYC

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Origins Media: What’s your point of view on the urban music market in the UK, in terms of its potential to expand?
David Miller: I’m very critical. There’s a lot of people who really believe that they’re gonna make it as rappers and as urban artists, and you’ve only gotta look at the history of the last 15/20 years to see that it’s never gonna happen. You need to be a bit more creative, you need to look at the landscape of the territory that you live in, listen to what’s being played on the radio, look around you at the audience that you’d be trying to sell your music to, and understand the economics of the fact that black people don’t really go out and buy music, so we’re not supporting our own – it’s cultural. I’m fed up, as I’m sure most of us are, of tryna be critical of our own community. It’s just what we do. It’s the same in the US.

If you really want to crossover, you have to crossover to a Caucasian middle-class housewife buying fanbase. Otherwise you’re never gonna make it if you rely on your own people, it’s never gonna happen. They’ll love your music, they’ll dance to your music, they might even play it – but I don’t know how many of them are gonna buy it. And then you’ve got to think about being in this country, Britain, where of 55 million people what percentage are really even interested in urban music? It’s a very small number. The media’s not interested in it - that music was kinda forced on them because of the success of urban music in the states in the early ’90s. They didn’t wanna play the music before and they don’t wanna play it now. So we’ve gone through that cycle where you turn on Radio 1, which for a while was dominated by urban music, and you don’t really hear it.
Marinate.......

Labels:

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

where was this article published? i'd like to read more?

11:41 am  

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home