Jean-Michel Jarre Quotes

I think music should be free. I think all communication should be free. I think people should respect artists, and there should be a certain respect for artists who give their music away for free.

Because I don't believe music can be free unless it has something to be free from.

There are a lot of people who really abused sampling and gave it a bad name, by just taking people's entire hit songs and rapping over them. It gave publishers license to get a little greedy.

I would never put my songs in a commercial.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I don't think music should be free.

The big news already broke. The file-sharing and all that stuff, it's a done deal. And I think figuring out how to make that a fair exchange for the people that make music is still an issue.

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

In this age when people expect to get their music for free, we have to work out how we can protect the rights of creative artists so they are compensated fairly and that the record business itself remains sound and healthy.

Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it.

If you are a musician who has released albums, it would perhaps be morbidly interesting to know how much you would be owed if everyone who now has your music had actually bought your record.

All artists deserve compensation for their work, including musicians.

Governments can help support European music by promoting public awareness that when people take music that doesn't belong to them, they undermine the future of those very artists whose work they enjoy.

The income streams of musicians have all been upstreamed into the pockets of computer corporations. Sound recordings are little more than free crackerjacks inside every computer or cellphone that you buy.

When people who are songwriters say 'That's my property and if you give it away for free then I'll lose my incentive,' then, well, good riddance.

A hundred years ago, of course, the question that the German Composers' Co-operative asked itself sounded a lot more fundamental: How do you create a fair share for those who ensure that works can actually be performed at all?

People think that it's their sovereign right to download music and not have to pay for it.

If you want to play somebody's music, you'd better go into his house.

Obviously, I want it to be legally downloaded, and I myself have spent a fortune on iTunes because, for me, that's the easiest way to get music.

I spend all my time right now trying to combat music retail and copyright.

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

When I do a film score, I am basically nothing more than a fancy pencil for hire. I don't own any of the music when I am - it belongs to the film company - and likewise, when I am done, even if I come up with something astounding that I may want to revisit... in the world of film composition, you can't do that.

With Napster and the sharing of music, of course, there are going to be people who exploit it. Greed has no end. But there's a lot of good that could happen. We shouldn't let the economic concerns of the major labels infringe on our freedom to share music.

You can't fool yourself anymore that your art is your art. When you're not getting paid for that song that's being traded back and forth among millions of people on the Internet, you have to think like a businessperson.

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.

I used to hate sampling, but it was basically because everyone was getting paid but us. But when they began to do the legislation and get it right, I realized that the kids just did something that, if maybe we were smart enough, we would have done it as well.