David Knopfler Quotes

Back in the day people made music to go on tour. They didn't make music to make a video.

Musicians by and large make a living with a relationship with an audience that is economically harnessed through performance and ticket sales.

When we started playing our music, there weren't really many bigger punk bands. We wrote for ourselves. We weren't expecting to get a record deal or get on the radio.

People are making their own records in their houses. It's an exciting time.

When you don't have a record label and you have been on your own as we have, you can look at all these other ways you can get in touch with other people and get music out there again.

That's my favorite subject because it really levels the playing field for artists these days. You don't have to sell out to the record company. You don't have to get a five hundred thousand dollars, or whatever, and pay them back for the rest of your life to record a record.

Now the music industry is sort of like a Craigslist venture, right? Where you're making your own records and selling them online.

Because of the way the record business has kind of stumbled and disintegrated, in a way, you're as likely to sell records at your merch table at your gigs as you are to sell them in a regular record outlet or even online.

Since the decline of record companies and music sales, I've always played live.

You have social networking, and you can do things efficiently without the might of a big label.

When it comes to independent music albums, you cannot put in 50 lakhs or a crore in each and every song to first make a video and then even promote it. It's not possible for a musician or a singer to promote each song. It's not possible for musicians to do that independently.

Bands are actively seeking more film involvement - because the days of recording albums and MTV and even touring, to some extent, are gone.

I created the Soundcloud big bang; you already know what's going on.

We sold 1.5 million copies of the 'Abracadabra' album and 26,000 copies of 'Italian X-Rays.'

I have mixed feelings about Napster. I like what it can do for an unsigned band. It can help them sell 10,000 records. But for an established artist, there's already so much piracy around. They need to regulate it.

I put some songs on the Internet back in 2009 - that's kind of how everything started with Washed Out. I had never really planned on being in a band or anything like that. It was kind of a hobby I did on my own, just recording music.

People don't buy music anymore; they're stealing it. But you can't steal a live show. There's no way to reproduce a real live show. So I think that when you put a great bill together, that people will come out for it.

Soundcloud is the best thing that ever happened to me honestly.

I started my whole career on Soundcloud and YouTube and was always looking for recourses to make music.

I record everything myself, I engineer everything myself.

Nobody sells records any more, and the only way you can actually do anything is to go out and play live.

If you're an artist, create music and put it out on the Internet. If you do this consistently, your fan base will continue growing, and that will power your entire career.

Because record companies do not routinely release sales figures the way film studios do, the weekly charts in trade publications like 'Billboard' provide the best independent measure of record appeal.

No. 1 records are fine, but in 2016, they just don't mean as much any more - the currency has changed.

When you do mixtapes, a lot of times your fanbase can say, 'We've been getting this for free for so many years, his new album is about to drop, we've listened to it, and we're not going to buy it. We'll download it for free.'