Ian MacKaye Quotes

How about no one's ever going to outsell Michael Jackson at selling records because the record industry is over. Game over. There's no more record stores. With no more record stores there's no more pressing plants. With no more pressing plants, there's no more charts.

There are a lot of musicians who are still desperately trying to pretend that it's 1998 and by having a huge marketing campaign, they somehow believe that they can sell 10 million records. That's delusional. No one sells 10 million records. The days of musicians getting rich off of selling records are done.

Formats are constantly changing, and there are really no rules for the way you put your records out anymore.

We believe that the Internet is the live concert promoters best friend although it might have crippled the record label business.

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

The business has changed dramatically from what it was even just a few years ago. Music isn't even distributed the same way anymore. Even CDs are becoming a thing of the past. The Internet has made it easier to get my music out to anyone who wants it, but at the same time, I feel like we're losing the mystique.

It's all downloading. As a matter of fact, within five years, there will be no CDs.

People don't buy records anymore. I don't know how people can support themselves.

I think the consumption of music is at an all-time high. But I think the ways that record companies are trying to monetize it is just all over the place. At the end of the day, music is in the clouds. Before, you could hold it, look at it, turn it around. Now, it's just in the air.

I don't think piracy is going to kill the music industry. But digital technology and the ability to download will change the packaging from CDs to a single-based business.

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

Kids are taking music for free all the time. They have Spotify, Pandora... The record companies aren't making the kind of music that they used to make. Artists make their money on tours, not from album sales.

I don't think that old-fashioned idea of record companies exists any more.

Obviously, as the music business has suffered tremendously, with being able to illegally download everything, it's also become amazingly easy to find new bands, because everyone can put their stuff online. Even if you can't find a record label, you can find these awesome bands, all over the world.

The music business has changed incredibly. There used to be 50 record companies. Now there's only three, and it's just getting smaller and smaller. But then again, you have the Internet, so anybody who has music can get it out there.

Between the record companies being the way they are and the fact that people can just download one song instead of buying a whole album, it's hard to make a good living nowadays.

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.

Records aren't selling anymore; people are burning music.

Rock stardom will die because nobody will make enough money any more to be rock stars.

Spotify is returning a huge amount of money. We'll overtake iTunes in terms of what we bring to the record industry in under two years.

Kids don't go out and buy CDs, they make their own, they download them from the Internet.

I'm not sure why anybody makes a physical CD anymore when the costs are so much lower to just throw it up on iTunes. And it doesn't seem that making a hard copy of something prevents pirating any less. I mean I'm amazed that they still do that.

We are at a crossroads in the music business: with the rise of the internet, the world we live in has changed, and the past is not coming back. But I see the glass as half-full: the internet and social networking are new avenues for the next Bob Dylan to be born on.

People are doing what they can these days and looking for creative ways to sell 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.