Jimmy Iovine Quotes

Look at music for what it's worth around the world and not just America. In other countries, people are still buying CDs and going to record stores. But in America, it's all about digital. The game is breaking down. But, look at me, you need to know how to play the game the right way.

I've seen 13, 14-year-olds opening CDs as though they're records from the 1920s, going 'Look at this - there's a little book!'... That makes me think the format has probably had its day.

Sheet music, recording, radio, television, cassettes, CD burners, and file sharing have all invalidated, to some extent, the old model of making a living making music.

When the music business failed to embrace the Internet, I thought it was game, set and match for the industry, and I quit.

Music files and downloading have indeed changed the currency of music to a great degree.

No one listens to CDs anymore. Who even owns a CD? I used to bring my CDs to shows, and it was, like, a guarantee that everyone would buy one. Nope! Not anymore.

I've watched the dynamics of music completely change to where we've sold tapes, we've sold CDs, then everything started becoming 'music is free' now. In a perfect world, Napster wouldn't have come along. But the world isn't perfect, and when it changes, you have to adapt.

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 as far as the music industry is concerned, it's kind of been the wild, wild West in a way with the Internet, which is not necessarily a bad thing to me.

Spotify appeared nine years after Napster, the pioneering file-sharing service, which unleashed piracy on the record business and began the cataclysm that caused worldwide revenues to decline from a peak of twenty-seven billion dollars in 1999 to fifteen billion in 2013.

Those record companies don't know what's happening at all.

With iTunes and Spotify and Pandora and this and that, you don't need to buy CDs any more.

Downloadable music is the biggest musical phenomenon since the Beatles, and the music industry is slow to come to grips with that.

I can assume that the younger generations will no longer know what vinyl was. Maybe some kids will take their CD back to the shop, telling the shop owner they have a faulty disc and if they could please get a new one.

The thing that happened with the music business, there are no stores anymore where you can buy music. It's all an online business now, and that's, you know - the bookstore culture is a very vibrant part of the American experience that we're very reluctant to see go away.

When radio stations started playing music the record companies started suing radio stations. They thought now that people could listen to music for free, who would want to buy a record in a record shop? But I think we all agree that radio stations are good stuff.

It's a radical time for musicians, a really revolutionary time, and I believe revolutions like Napster are a lot more fun than cash, which by the way we don't have at major labels anyway, so we might as well get with it and get in the game.

Selling MP3s or physical copies, it's still cool, but I think it's slowly becoming outdated to where people just want to build a culture.

Napster has pointed the way for a new direction for music distribution, and we believe it will form the basis of important and exciting new business models for the future of the music industry.

Digital downloading of music has affected us all in adverse ways.

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.

When it comes to music, we live in a very different world than everyone did in the 1960s and 1970s.

The whole format of entertainment that I did seems to be fading away. The music business of today is completely different when you see the videos and the music.

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.

The history of the music industry is inevitably also the story of the development of technology. From the player piano to the vinyl disc, from reel-to-reel tape to the cassette, from the CD to the digital download, these formats and devices changed not only the way music was consumed, but the very way artists created it.