Million Records Quotes & Sayings

I waited, and I'm sure Elvis did too, for each Ricky Nelson record like we would a Chuck Berry record or a Fats Domino record, to see what was going on. I used to say to some of the guys that Ricky Nelson learned to sing on million selling records. — Roy Orbison

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. — Beyonce Knowles

I have sold 120 million records. Half of those could be in Europe. — Slim Whitman

I would sell 2 million records, a million went to teenagers and a million went to the adults. So, when The Beatles became so popular, I lost a million to the teenagers, but I was still selling a million to the adults. — Bobby Vinton

I'm not trying to sound pretentious, but we did sell 12 million records on the first album, so we did get paid a little bit. — Justin Timberlake

President Obama, by the way, has set a Guinness World Record as the fastest person to get a million Twitter followers. Obama now has as many followers as the Republicans have presidential candidates. — Conan O'Brien

Mrs. B's story is well-known but worth telling again. She came to the United States 77 years ago, unable to speak English and devoid of formal schooling. In 1937, she founded the Nebraska Furniture Mart with $500. Last year the store had sales of $200 million, a larger amount by far than that recorded by any other home furnishings store in the United States. Our part in all of this began ten years ago when Mrs. B sold control of the business to Berkshire Hathaway, a deal we completed without obtaining audited financial statements, checking real estate records, or getting any warranties. In short, her word was good enough for us. Naturally, I was delighted to attend Mrs. B's birthday party. After all, she's promised to attend my 100th. — Warren Buffett

Some people remaster their records six, seven times, remix it three, four times, spend a million hours, then they always go back and hear a demo of it and they'll say, 'Aw that sounds so much better than the final mix.' — Jack White

Nobody heard records of you playing whatever the melody was on those low strings. It worked out good, you know, about 25 or 26 million records later. I guess it worked out alright. — Lee Hazlewood

If you've sold over a million records, you are not punk rock, you are milking the system for everything that it's worth. — Billy Corgan

With Celine Dion, we were selling 25 million records a pop. 'Pop' stands for 'popular.' It means we're plugging into the masses. — David Foster

This is our most complete record by far. A Hundred Million Suns sounds like the marriage of everything we learned from the Jeepster years and the Fiction years made into something new and bolder. Our spikiness and our indie-ness are coming through again with all the poppiness of the last two records. There's a lot of melody here and you can't cloak that whatever you do with it. This album is touched by our entire history, and hopefully sounds like our future too. — Gary Lightbody

You gotta' sell a million records before you talk about getting paid at a major [label]. — Betty Wright

The rewards we get by being those weird guys going against the grain to me are way more massive than selling a million billion records. I like climbing mountains or going on undersea dives for whales and stuff like that. — Lupe Fiasco

The eighties turned the whole system upside down. They would sign three groups and give them five or ten million dollars each to make three records. Out of those three records maybe one would be a hit. The economy changed, and that's why the music changed. — Tony Visconti

When I started playing music, people weren't selling 5 million records. That was not the standard; that was not the focus. — Prince

In the year Ten Million, according to Koradubian, there would be a tremendous house-cleaning. All records relating to the period between the death of Christ and the year One Million A.D. would be hauled to the dumps and burned. This would be done, said Koradubian, because museums and archives would be crowding the living right off the Earth. The million-year period to which the burned junk related would be summed up in history books in one sentence, according to Koradubian: Following the death of Jesus Christ, there was a period of readjustment that lasted for approximately one million years. — Kurt Vonnegut

Hillary has already gotten a record $8 million advance from Simon & Schuster for the book
reportedly the most anyone has ever received for rewriting history. — Ann Coulter

The biggest insecurity I had was my singing. Even though I had sold 70 million records, there was this feeling like, I'm not good at this. — Jennifer Lopez

Every artist obviously wants to sell a million records and do the MTV cribs thing, but I'm realistic. — JD Era

We asserted ourselves as a music community, and showed legislators that music is positive. Especially if you've sold 300 million records worldwide and pay taxes. — Krist Novoselic

Why do we need to wait until somebody sells 10 million records to give people a show like that? What about us smaller, hungry folk? At least gimme a curtain! — Angie Stone

Large-scale enthusiasm for folk music began in 1958 when the Kingston Trio recorded a song, "Tom Dooley," that sold two million records. This opened the way for less slickly commercial performers. Some, like Pete Seeger, who had been singing since the depression, were veteran performers. Others, like Joan Baez, were newcomers. It was conventional for folk songs to tell a story. Hence the idiom had always lent itself to propaganda. Seeger possessed an enormous repertoire of message songs that had gotten him blacklisted by the mass media years before. Joan Baez cared more for the message than the music, and after a few years devoted herself mainly to peace work. — William L. O'Neill

Sometimes a radio station will get ONE phone call from ONE person who screams that he is going to complain to the FCC. Instead of the guy at the stating thinking about how many listeners love the song, want to hear it again, and will support the station for playing it, usually the guy panics
and takes my records off the air. I object that.
It has never mattered to me that thirty million people might think 'I'm wrong.' The number of people who thought Hitler was 'right' did not make him 'right.' The same principle should be applied to anyone who has an individualistic attitude. Why do you necessarily have to be wrong just because a few million people think you are? — Frank Zappa

But now it's kind of a given that a 15-year-old would have a record deal and sell a quarter of a million records. No one's expecting her to answer any deep theological questions. And I'll tell you, I was asked some deep theological questions from the git-go. — Amy Grant

If I could sell 500 million records every time, it would be great. But I've also had the luxury experience of having it when I was a teenager, in a very kind of model version of it. — Alanis Morissette

Madonna, eat your heart out, Britney Spears, eat your heart out. I would say we have diamond records coming - they're gonna sell 10-million plus. — Spencer Pratt

When 'Ice Ice Baby' was selling a million records a day, I bought several properties: a home next to Michael J. Fox in L.A., a palace in Miami and a mountain cabin in Utah. Then, a few years later, I took a break from touring, saw that my properties had cobwebs, so I sold them, and - to my surprise - I made a huge profit! — Vanilla Ice

If you would care to discover what happened seven and a half million years later, on the great day of the Answer, allow me to invite you to my study where you can experience the events yourself on our Sens-O-Tape records. That is, unless you would care to take a quick stroll on the surface of New Earth. It's only half completed, I'm afraid - we haven't even finished burying the artificial dinosaur skeletons in the crust yet, then we have the Tertiary and Quaternary Periods of the Cenozoic Era to lay down, and ... — Douglas Adams

Just six days after its release on iTunes, a record-breaking 33 million people have already listened to the album. — Eddy Cue

There are millions of different species of animals and plants on earth
possibly as many as forty million. But somewhere between five and fifty BILLION species have existed at one time or another. Thus, only about one in a thousand species is still alive
a truly lousy survival record: 99.9 percent failure! — David M. Raup

China's got a billion people and a hit record over there is a million records. You know that ain't right. — Quincy Jones

I heard a quote once in a documentary about a band that said you're better off owning everything 100 percent and selling 20,000 copies of an album than signing with a record company and selling a million copies. There has never been a truer statement about show business than that. — Bill Burr

The fans are the end result of what we do. Sometimes I think we forget that those are the folks that mean it in this game. There's plenty of evidence to be found that you can have all the #1 records in the world, but if you really ain't touchin' them, you don't come home with gold records and platinum records. I'm very proud that we've only had one #1 record, but we've sold two and one half million! — Aaron Tippin

There are a lot of musicians who are still desperately trying to pretend that it's 1998 and by having a huge marketing campaign, they somehow believe that they can sell 10 million records. That's delusional. No one sells 10 million records. The days of musicians getting rich off of selling records are done. — Moby

Take just one well-known event: The Beatles' 1964 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. This has been depicted with astonishing regularity as a pivotal cultural moment; in fact an entire movie -- I Wanna Hold Your Hand -- was built around it. And that Sullivan episode was indeed a major event in popular culture. But did you know that in 1961, 26 million people watched a CBS live broadcast of the first performance of a new symphony by classical composer Aaron Copland? Moreover, with all the attention that sixties rock groups receive, it may come as a surprise to learn that My Fair Lady was Columbia Records' biggest-selling album before the 1970s, beating out those of sixties icons Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and The Byrds. — Jonathan Leaf

Nobody's going to sell 10 million records by not working hard. — Daryl Hall

Well, the album 'Intuition' is out and just went platinum officially. So I think to have the music doing what it's doing right now, man, it's the ultimate. Nobody is really selling records out there but we are at a million records and we dropped it at Christmas, so we are just trying to get that thing to like two million, you know. — Jamie Foxx

For us, selling a million records in 2005 is the equivalent of selling 2 to 3 million records (five years ago). Rock records aren't flying off the shelves like they used to. Hip-hop and pop are so huge. (But) everything's on the upswing for us. — Jacoby Shaddix

We never had a billionaire brand in music; the closest thing we had was Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson sold 750 million records. I think we're gonna set the tone for other youngsters to make more money and see that a billion dollars can be accomplished. — Birdman

We are now beyond nature's normal variation in terms of how the atmosphere is composed. Nature did something for a million years. It actually goes back a lot further than that, but the ice core records show a million years. So, nature has this normal oscillation within this zone, and all of a sudden, we're forty percent outside that zone. — James Balog

I want to be successful. Not just money. Just making a successful record and a successful show. I could feel successful without selling a million records. — Tom Petty

Oh, Michael Jackson is Michael Jackson. And no matter if he sold 40 million records off of one record and sold 15 off his last or whatever the counts may be, Michael Jackson will be Michael Jackson. — Tito Jackson

[A]s soon as you try and take a song from your mind into piano and voice and into the real world, something gets lost and it's like a moment where, in that moment you forget how it was and it's this new way. And then when you make a record, even those ideas that you had, then those get all turned and changed. So in the end, I think, it just becomes it's own thing and really I think a song could be recorded a million different ways and so what my records are, it just happened like that, but it's not like, this is how I planned it from the very beginning because I have no idea, I can't remember. — Regina Spektor

You're only famous in the eyes of others. Inside, you're still the same, and not a hundred million records or TV shows can change that. I think the only pitfall of fame is believing that it means something, and behaving like that. — Jamie Cullum

Hurricane Katrina reiterated the need for [access to] medical records, ... But there's going to be a lot more needed than $4 million. — Thomas Carper

The truth is that any figure of Africans imported into the Americas which is narrowly based on the surviving records is bound to be low, because there were so many people at the time who had a vested interest in smuggling slaves (and withholding data. Nevertheless, if the low figure of ten million was accepted as basis for evaluating the impact of slaving on Africa as a whole, the conclusions that could legitimately be drawn would confound those who attempt to make light of the experience of the rape of Africans from 1445 to 1870. Pg. 96 — Walter Rodney

Kat picked up a folder labeled Senior. "What are these? Bank records?" She did a double take, looking at Hale. "Did your dad really pay two million dollars to the campaign to elect Ross Perot?"
"I ... " Hale said, stumbling for words and thumbing through another file. "Wow. I guess my cousin Charlotte isn't really my cousin."
"Don't worry," Kat said. "It looks like there might be a kid in Queens who is. — Ally Carter

My grandmother worked at one of those Bel-Air mansions, and we would go - not too often, but every now and then - to pick her up. Hollywood was probably 12 miles from my house, but it might as well have been a million miles away. The only time I saw that world was on TV. Until I started making records. — Ice Cube

Some musicians like to decorate their walls with discs saying: '1 million records sold in America.' I prefer to put up discs marking sales in lesser-known countries. — Jamie Cullum

People think about, when you sell a million records, "Oh. You must be buying Ferrari's and living in mansions." It was never really like that. — Kevin Martin

Nowadays, you have to sell, like, half a million or a million records just to break even. — Maynard James Keenan

None of us went to university, none of us went to college, none of us played in a different band before, none of us done anything. We were the last great band to come out of nowhere, on an indie label. We've sold 50 million records. That's still the benchmark. Until someone does what we've done, I'll always consider myself the last big songwriter — Noel Gallagher

Amy Winehouse: Did she invent white soul? Wearing a beehive? No. But she did something brand new and fresh, altogether as a package, and you see who's in her wake, from the Duffys to the Lana Del Reys ... Adele selling 20 million records? That would not have happened if Amy Winehouse was alive. — Jack White

For three years, between 16 and 19, I was the opening-act-for-the-opening-act-for-the-opening-act, you know? And then I was on tour with Ice-T, Stetsasonic, EPMD, Sir Mix-a-Lot - legends - and went on to sell 160 million records. It still baffles me. — Vanilla Ice

I was the kind of entrepreneur that never really felt I made it. When Mike Olefield's "Tubular Bells" [Virgin Records' first release] sold 8 or 10 million copies, I suppose, at age 19, I could've possibly retired on the money. Instead, I immediately pushed the boat and took that risk again. — Richard Branson

We can't even expect our immigration officials not to make citizens of convicted felons.1 Tens of thousands of immigrants have been granted citizenship after being convicted of crimes in the United States. And, no, you can't see their names or read about their crimes. A year before the 1996 presidential election, the Clinton White House worked feverishly to naturalize 1 million immigrants in time for Clinton's reelection. Criminal background checks were jettisoned for 200,000 applicants, so that citizenship was granted to at least 70,000 people with FBI criminal records and 10,000 with felony records.2 Murderers, robbers, and rapists were all made our fellow Americans so the Democrats would have a million new voters by the 1996 election. In 2013 alone, the Obama administration released 36,007 convicted criminal aliens with about 88,000 convictions among them - including 426 for rape and 193 for murder.3 They'll soon be your fellow citizens, too. — Ann Coulter

Within twenty years at the most, he reflected, the huge and simple question, "Was life better before the Revolution than it is now?" would have ceased once and for all to be answerable. But in effect it was unanswerable even now, since the few scattered survivors from the ancient world were incapable of comparing one age with another. They remembered a million useless things, a quarrel with a workmate, a hunt for a lost bicycle pump, the expression on a long-dead sister's face, the swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy years ago; but all the relevant facts were outside the range of their vision. They were like the ant, which can see small objects but not large ones. And when memory failed and written records were falsified - when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested. — George Orwell

I'd rather sell 10,000 records that represent me than 2 million that don't represent me at all. — Phillip Phillips

In a city of twenty million like New York, there might be one or two terrorists. Maybe ten of them at the outside. 10/20,000,000 = 0.00005 percent. One twenty-thousandth of a percent. That's pretty rare all right. Now, say you've got some software that can sift through all the bank records, or toll pass records, or public transit records, or phone call records in the city and catch terrorists 99 percent of the time. In a pool of twenty million people, a 99 percent accurate test will identify two hundred thousand people as being terrorists. But only ten of them are terrorists. To catch ten bad guys, you have to haul in and investigate two hundred thousand innocent people. — Cory Doctorow

I'm kind of proud of that little record! I mean I've heard about a million other records that have come out since then by all these groups around here and there and I really like 'Little Johnny Jewel'. — Tom Verlaine