Roger McGuinn Quotes

The music business has changed incredibly. There used to be 50 record companies. Now there's only three, and it's just getting smaller and smaller. But then again, you have the Internet, so anybody who has music can get it out there.

The record industry is still pissed off that other people are making money off their business, even if it promotes their products and increases their sales. I think they're still mad about radio.

Between the record companies being the way they are and the fact that people can just download one song instead of buying a whole album, it's hard to make a good living nowadays.

We are at a crossroads in the music business: with the rise of the internet, the world we live in has changed, and the past is not coming back. But I see the glass as half-full: the internet and social networking are new avenues for the next Bob Dylan to be born on.

You used to make records, record companies sold them, and people went to record stores and bought them. That's all gone now.

Corporate America couldn't be more excited about the demise of the record companies.

The digital revolution has disrupted most traditional media: newspapers, magazines, books, record companies, radio.

The bricks and mortar of the music business, they don't exist any longer.

I feel like, as musicians, we need to fight the Spotify thing. I feel that in some ways what's happening in the mainstream is the last gasp of the old industry. Once that does finally die, which it will, something else will happen.

I think it would be a good thing in the creative community if there was less embarrassment of this word 'commercial' because that's how you make a business.

The advent of the Internet exposed the fact that the old business model for newspapers was broken. The world wide web fundamentally changed the media eco-system, challenging established journalistic practice in what is known as the mainstream media: radio, television, newspapers and magazines.

The imminent demise of the large record companies as gatekeepers of the world's popular music is a good thing, for the most part.

You're starting to see new record companies and business models taking shape, but it takes time.

One startup I dream of funding is the one that kills the record companies.

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

Free-to-play isn't a business model. Free-to-play is a marketing strategy. It's a way to get people over the hump of trying out your game. It gets rid of the friction that happens when you charge an upfront fee.

The music industry is an interesting lens through which to look at change, because it has had such a difficult time adjusting to the digital age.

I'm into it, I'm into MP3's; I think there's no way you're ever going to be able to legislate people having to buy a record in order to listen to it. You have to look at it as a means of promotion, and if the music is good enough, promotion is a good thing.

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.

The bad thing about young people starting a company is that sometimes they do it for the wrong reasons or because they have the wrong skill set, but the good thing is that they don't have any of the old paradigms baked into them, so they have a lot of the bright new ideas that are harder to come by as you get older.

… people who have built a business doing it the old way think it would be better if things could be more stable for longer periods of time. But you have to remember, new inventions are not inherently disruptive. Invention is only disruptive if customers say, “Hey, I like this better than the old way”.

I grew up in an era where the record companies just sold records to everybody, and the whole family bought songs. Today, record companies are failing because they are putting their accent just on the young, and I think that's rather silly.

I will always do music, and now - with where the world is going with social media and people dropping stuff for free and doing this and doing that - there's no excuse.

I have watched music go from an art form into an industry. And I have watched it stop dead in its tracks because of the digital age.

The music industry is transforming fairly rapidly.