Michael Bolton Quotes

You still have Top 40 radio now, but it's 40 different stations. There aren't many hits that everybody knows, and there aren't many real superstars.

I essentially grew up listening to Radio 1, the chart show in particular. It was a routine, as for many young people. Every Sunday, I waited patiently to be told who was on top.

Kids just want to have one song. They don't care about a body of work; they don't even care about a whole album - they just want whatever's hot right now. They download that song, and that's it.

I think 'pop' can be a bit of a dirty word. People are very cool in Australia. They don't like to admit that they like pop. There are people who listen to Triple J and cool stuff like that, but commercial radio is massive, and if you look at the sales of the pop songs every week, people love pop music.

Nobody wants to hear R&B. It's sad. If you want to be on the radio you got to stay young.

Given that there was that era of girl group music and it's still very popular, but I think if you looked at the chart from that time you would see many more men on it. Because the industry, they were catering to young girls. I mean, that's what they thought their audience was.

I think it's ridiculous to try to sell records to teenagers, because teenagers don't buy my records. And there ain't that many teenagers out there in the marketplace.

Before 'American Idol' and all this stuff, I was obsessed with music charts, and I used to go online to find out what was popular in other countries. I'd log on to the BBC website, and that's how I found out about artists like Natasha Bedingfield, Daniel Bedingfield and Take That.

I got my influences from '70s bands - Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, blah blah blah. When I was growing up, we had all these crazy bands on the Top 40. Today, if Pink Floyd released 'Money,' it wouldn't even get played.

With pop music, the format dictates the form to a big degree. Just think of the pop single. It has endured as a form even in the download age because bands conform to a strict format, and work, often very productively, within the parameters.

You know, I listen to contemporary music all the time.

When I hear other artists talk, they talk about 'How come radio's not playing my song?' Well, you have to look at it under a microscope and know that each station is just trying to do what's right for their market, and it's scary for a radio station to add a song that they don't know how well it's gonna do for them.

I think the pop industry is still a young man's game.

Pop music, I think there's a reason why kids connect to it.

I think the stuff that plays on the radio, the majority of it is for teenagers, which is okay. That's what pop radio is about. And some of it is great, and some of it is not.

Jay-Z, he knows precisely who he's going for - 14-year-old white suburban girls.

I grew up in the day when the Beatles sold 1 million singles in a week. And all you've got to do now is sell about 10,000 singles and you're in the charts.

Selling a million records used to be a big deal. I guess it's not anymore.

The Internet has changed how young people listen to music. Television programs like 'American Idol' changed how people listen to music. It was no longer the songwriters that we celebrated; it was the singers.

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

The industry has always had a problem with the 18-to-25 market, but EDM is perfect - a unique identifier for a group in that mental and fiscal state; in their youth, but free to do whatever they want. We filled that void.

We knew we were making records for a certain demographic. We didn't look outside of that.

We Can't Stop' - everyone said that it wasn't going to work on pop radio, because it didn't have an EDM-type beat. But it went to No. 2 on Billboard and No. 1 on iTunes.

If you respond to pop music as an older person, then it's your game. But this business has a tremendously visual focus.

The most important single fact about pop music in the Nineties, is the number of hours made commercially available increased by an estimated factor of ten.