David Coverdale Quotes

I hate the industry even more now, no bands get nurtured anymore. Labels only spend money promoting acts they know will be Top Ten. I find it offensive spending $2 million on a video.

We've managed to have a long career that is still quite vibrant, yet we've never had to kow-tow to record companies who said we weren't commercial enough.

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.

There are people who are genetically made to start record labels, and I'm not one of those people. People just have it in their blood and are good at it. Corey Rusk from Touch and Go and Ian MacKaye. These are people who have made their own labels.

'Vinyl' is a good look at the music industry. The script was honest.

When it all started, record companies - and there were many of them, and this was a good thing - were run by people who loved records, people like Ahmet Ertegun, who ran Atlantic Records, who were record collectors. They got in it because they loved music... Now, record companies are run by lawyers and accountants.

A lot of very popular mainstream artists are products of record companies and marketing companies, and any time anyone can stand outside of that, that's interesting.

You rarely get money out of labels, except for when they open up a budget for a project. Other than that, it's a do-or-die type thing.

I don't relate to what's left of the music business. There doesn't seem to be any point to it anymore. The business that I grew up in and loved, we made records a different way - there were record companies, there were stores where you could buy albums.

Artists were nurtured back in the '70s. Their music was developed by the record companies.

The music industry is a very rough industry. Many years ago, I think it was even rougher in the sense that a lot of it was predicated on image.

The record companies don't give you a chance, like in the old days when they went, 'Here's a pile of money. Go make a good record!'

You see the music videos and the bling and the cars, but all of that goes home at the end of the shoot. They make nothing because there's less and less money in the music industry.

A lot of big labels will just sign bands like a write off.

Back in the '90s, if you did mail order in music, you could make a good living doing it if you could hustle.

Those record companies don't know what's happening at all.

This is a very screwed-up business. Record labels don't sign a lot of bands these days. We just want to find a home and stay there and make records and do our thing and not have to look over our shoulder.

Artist development is something that I've been passionate about from my days at Uptown and Motown Records.

I don't get involved in record label politics.

You think publishing is tough but the music world is ten times tougher.

Reps once took chances on art, History's most treasured musicians were believed in and cultivated to reach their potential. Today, it would be difficult for those musicians to get deals.

By now all rock bands are wise enough to be suspicious of music industry scum.

Doing things in my day was simple: you either signed to a big label or you signed to a very small label, and you worked with that one, and then they eventually signed you on to a big one.

I think that's the problem in a lot of music. We've got these record labels.

If you have good songs and a real desire to make music, the next thing to do, instead of approach record companies, is to get yourself a really good manager because then it allows you to focus on your profession of being a musician. Then they can focus on the darker art of the record label and the music industry.