Art & Creativity Quote by Roy Ayers

There is a quiet flex in Roy Ayers framing this as a matter-of-fact business choice, not a crusade. He lays out the standard trap door of the recording industry in plain language: sign directly, make the art, watch the ownership slide away. No melodrama, just the clean mechanics of leverage. That plainness is the point. When musicians talk about contracts, they often get pushed into either victimhood or villainy; Ayers refuses both. He sounds like someone who learned the rules early enough to route around them.

The key phrase is "owned by the record company". He doesn't say "licensed" or "distributed". He chooses the blunt word that artists feel in their bones when their songs get repackaged, sampled, or monetized without their control. Coming from a figure whose work has been endlessly sampled in hip-hop and R&B, the subtext is especially sharp: ownership isn't abstract when your catalog becomes cultural infrastructure for other people's hits.

"But I did mine through a production company" lands like a door quietly closing. It's not just savvy; it's structural independence. A production company can function as a buffer, a negotiating entity, a way to keep masters closer to the creator and treat the label as a partner rather than a landlord. In the long arc of Black music especially, that distinction echoes decades of artists watching value extracted from their labor. Ayers isn't preaching; he's leaving a blueprint in a single sentence: the music is art, but the contract decides who gets to live off it.