When I was a teenager, I was mostly getting tapes and CDs, and somebody hipped me to the fact that you can get things on vinyl that are not necessarily available on any other fomat.
If you wake up in the morning and your favorite artist isn't on the service that you're paying ten dollars a month for, sooner or later you lose faith in the subscription model.
The reality is, when I'm sitting in a hotel room at 3 in the morning, and I see something on the Internet that interests me in the form of a band I want to hear, I like the ability to just go online to iTunes and download it immediately.
It's kind of a miracle to think that a device in your pocket can play pretty much any song that the world has ever created.
There's so much excellent new music around that I can't afford to buy it all and I haven't the time to review as much as I'd like. I can't remember a better time to be a musician or to listen to music!
I have a lot of compact discs. I need them for radio play and convenience. Many bands and artists I am a fan of don't always release their work on vinyl, so I take what they feel like giving me.
If you can use a search engine, you can find any piece of music that's been recorded for free. I'm not saying that's right, but it's a fact, and I'm surprised that more people don't accept or acknowledge that and try to adapt in some way.
People are still hearing your music. They might not be buying it, but they might be having it and you don't know it. Your music is still out there.
I think eventually all music will be free.
Spotify - I met those guys before they launched in America and was wildly excited about the idea. 'Wow, this is all the music in the world, for a flat fee.'
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.
I think it's important that everybody has access to music, and not just people who live in cities or who can afford to drive to the nearest city.
There's no doubt that the ready availability of music online has created a thousand more opportunities than it's destroyed.
I think if there was an ISP tax of some sort, we can say to the consumer, 'All music is now available and able to be downloaded and put in your car and put in your iPod and put up your a-- if you want and it's $5 on your cable bill.'
However, yes, especially as one gets older, you know, you really hope that your music will become more generally available, even though some of the performances might be riddled with faults.
People just want to have access to all of the world's music.
Every town in America had at least one, two, or maybe three radio stations that played rock 24 hours a day. In England, we had a rock specialist on for two hours a week.
I don't have the same access or time to gain access to music the way I used to.
I believe it is our responsibility to make sure that Tupac's entire body of work is made available for his fans.
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.
In fact, I heard Bird first, and had got well into listening to him. You know, it's the kind of accidental thing that awareness of a player is: what's available, what somebody happens to play for you.
You had to go to a different part of town from where I was to get Muddy Waters singles. I had him on singles.
I'm not saying you can't be successful in the music industry without Spotify. But when I look at the future of music, I don't think scarcity is the model anymore. We have to embrace ubiquity - that music is everywhere.
There's not a single genre that is hard to find or hard to get.
The idea of a streaming service, like Netflix for music, I'm not totally against it. It's just we won't put all of our music on it until there are enough subscribers for it to make sense.
