Todd Rundgren Quotes

If a kid goes and buys a CD at Best Buy, we have no idea who the person is, how many times they listen to it, or anything like that.

After coming from a major label, I realized the entire business has been decimated, and you can't look to labels to try to figure it out because they don't even use the technology, and they're oblivious to how people consume music these days.

Starbucks has changed the rules of engagement for the music industry.

Founders go wrong when they start to believe their business plan will materialize as written. I advise entrepreneurs to burn their business plan - it's simply too dangerous to the health of your business.

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

I started the site when I was 19. I didn't know much about business back then.

We're not in the business of shaping consumer demand. We respond to it.

You change your business plan to anticipate and adapt to changes in the marketplace.

The subscription model of buying music is bankrupt. I think you could make available the Second Coming in a subscription model and it might not be successful.

A lot of people don't listen to the albums. They just listen to the singles.

Most companies that are successful listen to people and see what they want and they make that. So when I used to make songs, I'd make mixtapes. The public would tell me what they like and then I would make songs based on what they like. That's how I knew 'Ridin' Dirty' was going to be big - they told me they liked this kind of music.

Using science to tell us what customers are looking for is second nature for us here.

There's still value in a CD, even if it's just nostalgic. People are still willing to pay. But it can't compare to a digital-only release where you can control the exact time that it'll come out, you know what I mean? So whoever finds how to bridge that gap is gonna make a lot of money.

I'm always kind of contradictory to what people want and what's selling. But maybe I should care now because I have two or three more outlets. I have to be more adaptable color-wise to what people want. It's usually just black and pink, and that's it.

A. T. Stewart started life with a dollar and fifty cents. This merchant prince began by calling at the doors of houses in order to sell needles, thread and buttons. He soon found the people did not want them, and his small stock was thrown back on his hands. Then he said wisely, "I'll not buy any more of these goods, but I'll go and ask people what they do want." Thereafter he studied the needs and desires of people, found out just what they most wanted, endeavored to meet those wants, and became the greatest business man of his time.

It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them. As Henry Ford said many years earlier: "If I had listened to my customers, I would have built a faster horse." Inventions in general express Shannon entropy. They come from the supply side.

Once you’re in sales, you will also learn what sells and what not. Use the sensitivity of detecting market sentiments as a platform for running your business and in the identification of product winners in the future.

Nobody wants to make great albums now because nobody wants to buy them and there's no place to sell them.

Visiting stores and testing products is one of the critical elements of the analyst's job.

I think if you are writing something that you are trying to design for someone else to like that is not necessarily you're demographic, it is a much harder road.

True marketing starts...with the customer, his demographics, his realities, his needs, his values. It does not ask, "What do we want to sell?" It asks, "What does the customer want to buy?"

Don't find customers for your products, find products for your customers.

I think people have been obsessed with the wrong question, which is how do we make people pay for music? What if we started asking, how do we let people pay for music?

Having the best product means nothing if the people won't buy it.

We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.