Prince Quotes

I can do anything onstage. Here's the misconception: You could record an album called 'The Best of Styx.' And all you would have to do is pay the individual songwriters a mechanical royalty.

You get royalties from certain songs that you do when you do background. It's according to the work that you put in.

Just because my song was being played on the radio didn't mean I had a load of money. You don't get royalties overnight.

If somebody makes a record, no matter how many years later it's released, they or their families should be entitled to the proceeds.

I'll go to the movies and hear 'Angel From Montgomery' in some film, and nobody ever even told me about it. They don't tell you your stuff is going to be in a movie. They don't have to, so they don't tell you. You get paid eventually.

Here's the way the licensing works ... If you write a song, nobody can record your song before you do without your permission. But, once the song is recorded, they can get what's called a 'compulsory license', and they can record the tune, but they have to pay you royalties.

There are so many songs I've recorded, only to hear other people singing them. It happens all the time.

There's this thing called compulsory licensing law that allows artists through the record companies to take your music at will without your permission.

Musicians make up for the copies of their songs that get pirated by performing live. I don't think there will be as many people showing up to hear me read as to hear Beyonce sing. We need to make sure piracy is dealt with effectively.

When I was in N.W.A. and didn't get paid all the money I was owed, that's when the business side of showbiz hit me.

The songs certainly have not made my fortune, but I am still grateful for the royalties when they come in.

It's the big boys, the Googles of this world, that are already benefiting from piracy and not paying the artists a dime.

Every time we buy a CD or download a song, the artist is paid for their work. You might not know that this isn't the case when a musician's work is played on the radio.

My sense of proprietorship has been so weak that actually I didn't pay attention and I lost the copyrights on a lot of the songs.

We live in a world with "free" content, and this freedom is not an imperfection. We listen to the radio without paying for the songs we hear; we hear friends humming tunes that they have not licensed. We tell jokes that reference movie plots without the permission of the directors. We read our children books, borrowed from a library, without paying the original copyright holder for the performance rights.

Unfortunately, nothing is ever that simple in copyright law, and when it comes to music copyright, it's especially convoluted.

Ability to download music for free might not be positive for the artists to get royalties, but in some ways it's still good that people can get your music, and hopefully in the course of that, people will want to see you live, around the world shows. It might get you to where you get to travel all over the planet. 'Cause now people are hungry: "Oh, I wanna see this guy, I wanna hear this music live, I wanna see if they're gonna remix it or funk it up differently when I see them."

Of all the creative work produced by humans anywhere, a tiny fraction has continuing commercial value. For that tiny fraction, the copyright is a crucially important legal device.

Many European countries, as well as Australia, Canada, Israel, and New Zealand, have adopted legislation that creates a 'public lending right', where the government recognises that enabling hundreds of people to read a single copy of a book provides a public good, but that doing so is likely to reduce sales of the book.

I'm singing the music publisher's theme song - it ain't a commercial.

The comedians all finished their acts with a song. They would get a certain amount of money from the song publishers and would use that money to pay the writers. None of them paid very much for their comedy material, but it all added up.

Record companies, I found out, can put out compilations without your permission.

Punishing people for listening to music is exactly the wrong way to protect the music business.

If you have a song that you think sounds like another song you should contact the publishing company and say I have a song here, let's cut a deal that lets everyone walk away feeling good.

I do work a lot. I mean, most of my income, I would say, comes from live performances. And then you've got publishing, you've got record royalties.