Michael Rapino Quotes

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.

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 don't even know what words to use to talk about the music industry anymore. But the business has changed a lot - the methods of releasing music.

I've been through the music industry and with the Internet the music industry is not what it used to be.

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

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.

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.

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 industry is an interesting lens through which to look at change, because it has had such a difficult time adjusting to the digital age.

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.

The Internet's changed everything. There are no record stores to hang out in anymore.

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.

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.

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.

I have friends who have a CD mastering plant in Hollywood and they are very sceptical about European record labels' understanding of digital technology.

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.

Recorded music is more a marketing tool than a revenue source.

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.

I feel like, as musicians, we need to fight the Spotify thing. I feel that in some ways what's happening in the mainstream is the last gasp of the old industry. Once that does finally die, which it will, something else will happen.

When radio stations started playing music the record companies started suing radio stations. They thought now that people could listen to music for free, who would want to buy a record in a record shop? But I think we all agree that radio stations are good stuff.

The music industry doesn't exist the way it used to. You'll never have another star like the stars of the '90s.

I think downloading is both saving and killing the music industry at the same time.