Donovan Quotes

I have always abhorred the business end of music.

Everyone has learned how to monetize music except the music industry.

It happens in this business - The Rolling Stones were ripped off, so were the Beatles. George Harrison hardly had anything left in the end.

You see the music videos and the bling and the cars, but all of that goes home at the end of the shoot. They make nothing because there's less and less money in the music industry.

When no one's buying your records, it's easy to justify selling a song. But once you start selling records, you can't really justify having two songs in Cadillac commercials. It looks greedy. And it is greedy. This whole music thing should be about music.

If you earned money listening to music, I'd be a millionaire.

Music can be so disturbing and frustrating. I mean the business side of it. The actual making music part is fun, but the business side of it is just so out of control, has nothing to do with anything.

I left home the day after I graduated from high school because I knew we weren't going to make any dough to pay the rent in music.

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

I didn't have any knowledge of the music industry when I first got to L.A., and I really didn't know on a creative level what I wanted to sound like, so I had to do a lot of experimenting. It led to a spiral of depression and being broke.

I feel quite sad for the young musicians coming up because they may never get to pay their rent properly. It doesn't matter what the genre; nowadays, it's so much harder than it ever was.

You think publishing is tough but the music world is ten times tougher.

By now all rock bands are wise enough to be suspicious of music industry scum.

It's a small percentile of people who see one dime out of the music business.

'Vinyl' is a good look at the music industry. The script was honest.

I wrote and produced millions and millions of selling records, so my publishing company alone was worth millions of dollars. I didn't have to work anymore in life because when the rappers started sampling... I'm the most sampled artist in history.

Books are so cheap and easy to get that people don't bother stealing them, which is the essential rule of piracy that the music business learned much too late.

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

When you grow up in life and you're poor, and because you're an athlete or you got rich overnight in music, unless you have access to financial advice or for the transition or matriculation of that process, then of course, you're going to go broke.

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.

You learn at a certain point that you have to focus on the business side of music. After getting ripped off a couple of times, you figure out that you need to get a grip on it.

The movie industry can be tricky and occasionally creepy, and I have this sense that the music industry is just shady as hell. I don't want to be a part of it.

The music industry is in such poor shape; it's in a really bad way, and a lot of people in the industry are very depressed.

You don't start to play your guitar thinking you're going to be running an organisation that will maybe generate millions.

I have known from the beginning one thing you need to know. That is, the music business is a business.