Chuck D Quotes

My whole career began because I was always putting my music on the Internet. By the time I had my first tour, I had an audience everywhere I went, because people were listening online. I started with a website, Jasonmraz.com, pre-YouTube. You could e-mail me directly, and I would send you a CD.

I started writing music when I was 15 in my bedroom, and I'd post them on MySpace, and from there it shifted to doing covers on YouTube and building my Twitter.

Radio and TV can still push a band, but things need to be shaken up. There is the Internet, but mostly what I see there is little kids on YouTube playing music.

Communion was born out of shared frustration in 2006. We felt that although the likes of MySpace and YouTube opened up the playing field for songwriters online, people's discovery of these new artists was only skin deep.

My whole career began because I was always putting my music on the Internet. By the time I had my first tour, I had an audience everywhere I went, because people were listening online.

Social media and music in general have been changing so fast. You can go on Twitter and go from one artist to another. What I really like about it is the opportunity to communicate directly with your fans.

You can put your music out on YouTube and get messages from all over the world.

There's so many people doing interesting things with the Internet and technology, there could be so many ways of making music and listening to it.

That's what I love about the Internet - instead of having to wait on radio to play your song or TV to play your video, I can use the Internet as a tool to get my music out earlier.

Social media being used to discover new artists is great. There's not a barrier to enter the industry. People can just post music and share it. And if it's good enough, and people like it, it will grow.

Technology has made music ultimately more democratic.

If your music is great, you will have fans, not because you have spent time chatting on social media.

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.

YouTube is an amazing platform for young musicians - although it's harder to get noticed now that everyone is on it.

File sharing is our radio; that's the way people hear our stuff.

You make your music, then you try to find whatever audience is out there for it.

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.

There's no doubt that the ready availability of music online has created a thousand more opportunities than it's destroyed.

This is a way for artists to communicate directly to their fans. If you think of an artist like Bruno Mars, he's using Spotify, creating playlists and listening to music through it.

At Spotify, we really want you to democratically win as a musician. We want you to win because your music is the best music.

SoundCloud was my first break I guess. I got a little bit of a following.That whole bedroom producer genre was kind of kicking itself into gear, and SoundCloud was becoming more of a hub for producers at the time.

I try to keep track of what the kids are doing on Soundcloud, and all the new guys coming up.

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

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

I am making good music, and I want people to listen to it.