Steve Earle Quotes

I can still make a living with touring. And maybe you buy a t-shirt. And I would rather 10 million people get my record and listen to it for free than 500,000 that I coerced to pay $15 for it, you know?

A lot of people don't know about music, but buy records. A lot of people that know about music can't afford to buy records.

The CD, it should be noted, was born out of greed. It was devised to prop up record sales on the expectation of people replenishing their record collections with CDs of albums they had already purchased.

To be truthful, Jay-Z wouldn't have a quarter of the records sold today if it wasn't for the white people buying his records.

People don't buy records anymore. I don't know how people can support themselves.

The fact of the matter is that 40 years ago, unless you bought the record, you couldn't hear the music. It was such a narrow track in comparison to today.

I think it's ridiculous to try to sell records to teenagers, because teenagers don't buy my records. And there ain't that many teenagers out there in the marketplace.

People say, 'How's the record doing?' In the old days you'd say, 'We're at 600,000, it's doing great.' You don't say those things anymore. Those numbers are gone.

Now, we are selling over 5 million songs a day now. Isn't that unbelievable? That's 58 songs every second of every minute of every hour of every day.

I never download anything; it's crazy! We must keep buying albums and DVDs.

The iPod has taken away the whole platinum record sales prospect. Sincerity and specificity are going to be the hot commodities in music. Everybody can have anything that they want, so now it gets into what specifically you have to give.

It's not like, I don't know, if Madonna has a new record out, then everybody from Bangkok to Birmingham knows what its called and can buy it the same week. But our stuff is not in that mass market.

Chart numbers can be deceiving. An album doesn't have to sell that much these days to show up really high on the charts.

The packaging has to really sell the product today, because kids can go out and buy a CD and then 10 kids can burn them. So you have to really be on your toes.

No one really buys records anymore. You can look at sales and do that math real quick. Unfortunately, it's fast food in the music industry. People don't ingest full records anymore.

Records are very powerful promotional tools to go out and be able to play on the road, but you do have to think about it as a way of sustaining itself at some point.

If you give the audience what they want when they want how they want it, they won't steal it.

I grew up in the day when the Beatles sold 1 million singles in a week. And all you've got to do now is sell about 10,000 singles and you're in the charts.

And once the music is out there, when you're selling a record and selling music and people are going to do whatever they want with it, it's kind of hard to resist certain opportunities, especially in the record market now.

Any time you can give consumers more of what they want, it's a good thing. Unbundling the album is a good thing. In the case of music - because it is content that you can slice into songs - doing that is of huge benefit to consumers.

People aren't buying records like they used to, so it's nice to try to figure out a way to make them do it. I would enjoy the same thing to own an old movie house, to try to trick people to come in - like having 3-D or Smell-o-Vision or Vibra-Vision or something. Mcguffins to get people interested.

Mick Jagger's fans bought records with their allowances. Sinatra's people bought them out of wages.

Until the governments don't have a clear law against piracy and the digital downloads are not working worldwide properly, the record industry will keep on suffering.

People who buy my records don't go into music stores - music stores which are fading before our very eyes.

We've always had big gaps between records.