Providing his take on the music business, which is heavily scrutinized for not properly paying artists, James Blake claims that “95 per cent” of the work he does as a producer is for free and “unpaid”.
In his interview with Rolling Stone, the 37-year-old musician stated “I’d say 99, not 99… 95 per cent of the work I’ve done was unpaid.”
When questioned about why he didn’t receive payment for his work, Blake replied “Well, because as a producer, you’re just throwing paint, you’re throwing stuff at a wall and seeing what sticks.”
Adding that much of his unpaid work never gets released, the superstar singer/songwriter who’s worked on tracks for Jay-Z, Kanye West, Frank Ocean, Beyonce, and Travis Scott, said “I’d say the 10,000 hours that we talk about arriving at some kind of mastery of something, I probably spent that just doing things that never came out, which is nuts really.”
Having released his latest album, Trying Times, on Friday (3.13.26,) James insisted that it’s “just the way the industry is that producers don’t get paid by the hour. So you can spend a lot of hours on a piece of music, and then the direction of a record can change.” “And that can happen with me too. I can just wake up one day and just realize, ‘Oh s***, we’ve been going in the wrong direction.’ And then five to 10 songs just disappear.” “Unusual industry for sure in terms of the way things are re-enumerated, the way time is rewarded. I think to come up against that kind of numbers game, I think you have to have a really true obsession with create, making music.”
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Author: Saul Goode
Photo: Tomjhill