John Mellencamp Quotes

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.

People now have been conditioned to believe they should only buy one song at a time, that nobody can make an entire record that would merit you paying, you know, $7, $8, $10 when CDs in the '90s were $18, $19 and people bought millions and millions and millions of them.

It used to be that you made an album and then you went on the road to promote that album, hoping for good record sales. Well, good record sales basically don't exist any more, and the emphasis has been more on the live show.

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'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.

No one really buys records anymore. You can look at sales and do that math real quick. Unfortunately, it's fast food in the music industry. People don't ingest full records anymore.

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

The rise of the iPod meant that digital music became the norm, It's sad, but you can still find the real stuff out there if you look for it!

It's harder and harder to sell records now. You've got to give extra value. You've got to give people a reason to go out and buy it rather than burn a friend's copy.

The culture of buying an album on CD or vinyl has gone out of the window. A lot of kids don't really understand that, they just hop onto Limewire, or find a BitTorrent, or even just go onto iTunes if they're going to pay for something. It's just right there, there's no searching about.

People don't buy CDs so much anymore because it's easy to download everything. So, while the record industry is declining, the music is heard a lot more than before.

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.

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.

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

People say, 'How's the record doing?' In the old days you'd say, 'We're at 600,000, it's doing great.' You don't say those things anymore. Those numbers are gone.

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.

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.

I can still make a living with touring. And maybe you buy a t-shirt. And I would rather 10 million people get my record and listen to it for free than 500,000 that I coerced to pay $15 for it, you know?

You have an entire generation of kids who grew up with the idea that music is something that you can download for free.

Rock and roll music - people want records. For me, it's the whole thing - the package. I don't get satisfaction from buying an MP3.

I don't think they like the idea that the people who are buying the record get to choose what goes out, because it's their job. The fans even pre-ordered stock to make sure that I had some sort of presence.

I think that if people realize that with an mp3, you're only getting five percent of the sound that's there. But when you hear the entire thing... I think it would save the music business. It's such a drastic change.