Johnny Mathis Quotes

I used to buy vinyl. Today, if you do put out a record on a label, traditionally, most people are going to hear it via a leak that happens two weeks - if not two months - before it comes out. There's no real way around that.

America stopped making vinyl and phased out the single but Germany held out and refused. Warner's never phased out vinyl in Germany. Now America imports it!

I'm trying to get hold of them... the trouble is a lot of the companies that recorded and produced the albums went bust, so I don't know where to get the masters.

I grew up in an era where the record companies just sold records to everybody, and the whole family bought songs.

Kids are taking music for free all the time. They have Spotify, Pandora... The record companies aren't making the kind of music that they used to make. Artists make their money on tours, not from album sales.

When it all started, record companies - and there were many of them, and this was a good thing - were run by people who loved records, people like Ahmet Ertegun, who ran Atlantic Records, who were record collectors. They got in it because they loved music... Now, record companies are run by lawyers and accountants.

CDs, too. Totally corporate. They look real cheap and soulless and they don't smell of anything.

I don't think that old-fashioned idea of record companies exists any more.

There was a report that used to come out back in those days, I don't know if it was the Gavin Report or something like that. And they said, no matter what McGuire comes out with next, we're not gonna play it.

I don't think they like the idea that the people who are buying the record get to choose what goes out, because it's their job. The fans even pre-ordered stock to make sure that I had some sort of presence.

In the '70s, you had to come up with an album every year whether you were ready or not.

Well, you know, back then there wasn't many albums, it was the singles. You sold singles.

My girlfriend at the time convinced me to send these songs to Cavity Search. When they wanted to put out my record I was totally shocked.

There aren't enough people who are scaring the kind of people who work at these record companies.

You have record companies that sign acts that they think are great, and then they never do anything. Acts that they don't think are really going to do much end up having a career. I don't think anyone really knows what it is that drives somebody to get on their computer and want to download a song.

When certain bootleg companies started off and they would take maybe ten per cent of whatever they got and help fuel new bands, which I'm cool with, I think that's a good idea. Most of the record companies are not doing that.

You know you're a hopeless record nerd when your time travel fantasies always come around to how cool it would be to go back to 1973 and buy all the great funk and jazz and salsa records that came out that year on tiny obscure labels and are now really rare and expensive.

People in the music business say don't make too many records because they'll compete against one another.

A lot of very popular mainstream artists are products of record companies and marketing companies, and any time anyone can stand outside of that, that's interesting.

I don't relate to what's left of the music business. There doesn't seem to be any point to it anymore. The business that I grew up in and loved, we made records a different way - there were record companies, there were stores where you could buy albums.

I don't even know what words to use to talk about the music industry anymore. But the business has changed a lot - the methods of releasing music.

I've toured the U.S. every single year and I've put a record out every single year whether it was on a major label or not; that doesn't make any difference to me.

I thought I'd be wasting my time to go to commercial record companies and make demos for them, because don't forget, I was doing what I was doing and nobody understood what I was doing.

People are scrambling to figure out how they can prolong the life of an album. But as long as the shelf space continues to shrink at retail, there's just no room for them anymore... which is fine with me! I would love to be the next person in country to just release digital singles, but I think we're probably a little ways from that.

I have a bunch of albums I would love to get re-released.