Steve Stoute

I never want to predict the relationship between music and advertising.

When you grow up in life and you're poor, and because you're an athlete or you got rich overnight in music, unless you have access to financial advice or for the transition or matriculation of that process, then of course, you're going to go broke.

I always felt like the Academy was very late in acknowledging things. I've seen them do it with hip hop when it should have been acknowledged. It was already penetrating mass levels of culture and radio, and yet they wouldn't give it a proper category.

There's much more money being brought into the advertising and communications business than in the music industry.

Translation and UnitedMasters, which is all one company, is my vision and my dream, and I think it's today's reality of the convergence between storytelling, technology, and culture.

I've started to believe that the agency business is a great ingredient of a much bigger business - more than just what typical advertising agencies have done.

Artists and the traditional record company model are at odds. The music business has notoriously taken from the artist. That shouldn't be the narrative.

Over the course of my 20-year history as an executive in the music business and as the owner of a firm that specializes in in-culture advertising, I have come to the conclusion that the Grammy Awards have clearly lost touch with contemporary popular culture.

I used to run record companies, and I went to the advertising business at 29 years old.

Hip-hop started as this niche moment, and the values of it, the cultures that it carried on its back; language, clothes, the way you wear your clothes, the items that you consume, all came with the music as an art form. And those things helped transform how people buy, shop, speak, engage.

Look at music like gaming. You monetize the game to all the people who are most engaged. I wanted to bring that theory and thinking to music.

Rapper's Delight' came from the TV entertainment show 'Good Times,' but when the times called for a shift in the narrative, artists answered, covering brutal truths in their rhymes that were uncomfortable for society to confront.