Maroon 5’s Adam Levine – HuffPost 7.23.10

Mike Ragogna: What is your advice for young artists coming up now?

Adam Levine: It’s hard to give advice because we’ve been doing this now for eight years. It’s really difficult to give advice in our position because there has been such a revolution in the way this business works since we entered it, basically. We didn’t have MySpace, we didn’t have outlets like YouTube and all these things that exist now. We didn’t have those things when we started, so we actually had to rely on good, old-fashioned hard work.

I know that makes me sound like a curmudgeonly old man. But we had to work, we had to go out on tour and play in front of people. We couldn’t advertise things on Twitter and do all these funky little technological things that bands can do now. So, what I would say is do all those things because it’s important at this point. But don’t be afraid to get dirty and go out and play for people. Go and play and tour. You’re going to get s**t on a little bit — hopefully not too much, but you’ve got to keep going. It’s really not easy. Succeeding in this particular business is extraordinarily difficult, so you just have to develop a thick skin and just go, go, go. We were a band for a long time before we succeeded, which I think was a good thing, sort of a blessing in disguise. I would just say, “Get ready to work.”