When I think about the stuff I turned down it's kind of insane.
It's satisfying to put out new music. And I think that's the context in which I'm comfortable revisiting things from the past.
I tend to gravitate away from the more trendy Ibiza style of dance music. It's not me.
There are a lot of music startups that don't have anything to do with anyone's love for music. It has to do with them having a glorious IPO and then retiring to the Bahamas somewhere. It's important to keep that in mind.
Yeah, I do. HipHop was, though I would not say all, cause I try to keep myself open to other things, but nearly all I listend to for the last 14 years of my life.
I have a natural fear of anything that feels like celebrating my own past to an extent that doesn't allow me to continue to look forward. I don't know psychologically why it is, but I get a little uncomfortable with nostalgia.
Another one of my favourite sayings is, you can't handpick your audience. I feel like I'm making music for people who think like me about music, and that takes a lot of different forms. I could never generalise - but I think if I were to generalise, I'd think that you would say that most of my fans are music lovers who are looking for something outside of the mainstream: maybe a little bit hard to pin down, a little bit hard to categorise.
In certain cases I don't want to sell tracks individually; I want to only sell the whole album. With simple things like that I just don't get any response [from iTunes]. I don't want to kill iTunes - I just want to offer my own retail experience in my own tiny corner of the Internet.
I think a band - even a band that's been around as long as the Rolling Stones - I think that's still the formula. You know you're gonna get those songs, and you don't mind sitting through the ones that you maybe don't know very well because you know they're not gonna let you down - they're not gonna mess with you. And I kind of feel the same way about the way I structure my shows.
When I first pursued this with Universal, they had no idea what to do. But now that we've gone through the whole process and I've signed this 60-page document that says what we can and can't do, I suppose it will be a little bit easier for the next person.
I saw. I wanted to start my own store so people would know that what they were buying was real. There were bootlegs around at the time that had my name on the cover, but the music had nothing to do with me. I'm not trying to compare myself to [Jimmie] Hendrix, but back in the '70s, there were some Hendrix bootlegs.
You can be a great DJ and still be not very good at DJ Hero. And vice-versa: You can have never spun in your life on real turntables and be fine on DJ Hero.
I would much rather people kick and scream and tear their hair out and accuse me of all kinds of blasphemy, than just have no opinion whatsoever.
I would rather have 10 people working on a record that are really committed and believe in it and love it, than 50 people who have no idea who I am or what I'm for.
Just like on Guitar Hero, there are things that are similar and things that are not similar at all. When I first played DJ Hero, I wasn't very good. The control surface is similar in some ways to a turntable, but in other ways not at all the same.
Like a lot of other DJs, I've been wondering when the first DJ game was going to happen. Somebody even pitched me on their own idea and I thought, "I'm not a video game startup; I don't know what I'm supposed to do with this."
I've been on a major label for 14 years. I've always wanted as many people as possible to hear my music, and it definitely made sense for the majority of my career to be on a major label, on a distribution level, to be in people's faces and be out there, and have access to major labels' incredible machine, even though they have not understood or haven't been invested in what I was doing.
I think I would be much more enthusiastic about a band that covered more than just one particular album of mine. I don't ever really intend to record or to do shows with a live band. I don't really have a problem with it, but it doesn't really affect me either way.
My problem with iTunes is that I don't have any say in how I'm represented on the site.
Things go wrong when the people who control that world stop listening to their own instincts and start catering to their fan base.
If you think of any long-term artist that makes music throughout several decades, you would hope that it's autobiographical and a form of self-expression, and that's certainly how I approach my music.
Any good album title has multiple meanings, and I like choosing titles where I find myself repeating it, almost like a mantra.
People love drama, and if you aren't really interested in perpetuating that, it keeps you from exploding on a mainstream stage. I'm totally fine with that.
I realized that people don't quite understand what I do when I was the new kid on the block and a lot of Hollywood was offering me fairly cheesy projects.
One of my favorite things that Yahoo does on a regular basis is this story: "Wealthiest Rap Artists." That's an example of the internet just perpetuating this myth that we're all just sitting around in these mansions like Steven Tyler, bopping around in our swimming pool. It's bullshit.
