Toto’s Steve Lukather – HuffPost 5.9.14
Mike Ragogna: Okay, it’s that time, what advice do you have for new artists?
Steve Lukather: Learn how to f**king play and sing. The big lie to a young person is they go into a studio and maybe they have some raw talent but it’s very rough. Maybe they’ve got a pretty face. But all of a sudden, they achieve fame and then they realize it’s the Milli Vanilli thing, they can’t really pull it off. So once you get found out, your career’s over. If you can really play and really sing and really write material, you’ll have a long career, if you’re really good and you can take punch after punch… But the record business is not what it was. A number one record doesn’t sell millions of copies anymore, and the whole internet thing, this bulls**t that we make money off of Spotify and YouTube is a lie.
MR: And to whatever degree, there’s the label.
SL: The record company gotta pay off. But they own you in perpetuity–that means forever. Trying to get them to account for anything is riddiculous. It’s really difficult to be young and see the career. My son is twenty-seven years old and making records and writing songs for other people and his royalty statements are miniscule compared to what it used to be back in the day. Even back in the day, the record company was making all the money. So it’s not fair that the artists have been getting so f**ked on this deal. Ask people that are in print…books and newspapers are going to go by the wayside the way records did. Now they’re going to start making hundred million-dollar movies that get ripped the first day and make no money. Somebody’s going to have to come up with a way to stop this. Intellectual property is still intellectual property. People don’t think music is a real way of making a living. Tell that to my kids I have to put through school and pay my bills like everybody else. I can’t go into the market and put food into my basket and go out without paying, but people have no problem stealing music, because they don’t think it’s really stealing anything. Here’s what it is… There’s money to be made but it’s not going to the right people. The guy who can sell advertising on your clip on YouTube and you make none of that money and he doesn’t give you any of that money and cashes out for a billion dollars even though he owns none of the content. How is that fair? That’s my point. Share the wealth! Why not give a little taste to the guys that made you f**kin’ rich?