James Blake has claimed that “95 per cent” of the work he does as a producer is “unpaid”.
The 37-year-old star has given an insight into the music business, which is heavily scrutinised for not paying artists fairly, by sharing that he does a lot of work for free.
He told Rolling Stone: “I’d say 99, not 99… 95 per cent of the work I’ve done was unpaid.”
When the interviewer pressed him as to why he didn’t receive payment for his work, he said: “Well, because as a producer, you’re just throwing paint, you’re throwing stuff at a wall and seeing what sticks.”
The singer-songwriter – who has worked on tracks for huge names, including Jay-Z, Kanye West, Frank Ocean, Beyonce, and Travis Scott – also shared that much of that unpaid work never sees release.
He continued: “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.”
He 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.”
James – who released his latest album, Trying Times, on Friday (13.03.26) – went on: “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.”
He added that it’s an “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.”
