Music Economics Quotes

There's no problem with fans and bands. There's a problem with the economics of the outside disruption of the industry.

One of the things I wonder is whether it's good that the whole free model makes a lot of people listen to more of your music. I'm wondering if it devalues it, it becomes disposable, because you can get it so easily.

Music is a big machine that would go on with or without me.

It's a radical time for musicians, a really revolutionary time, and I believe revolutions like Napster are a lot more fun than cash, which by the way we don't have at major labels anyway, so we might as well get with it and get in the game.

Music was everything. But what the digital revolution has done, with streaming services and downloads, is take the value out of music. When things lose value they lose their meaning.

The music business is strictly business.

Black music has become a commercial commodity. Live performances are not so accessible as they were previously. It use to be possible to go to the bar on the corner and hear music. It was available for a fifteen cent beer.

Nowadays, you have to sell, like, half a million or a million records just to break even.

Because of the fashion, the young people don't have any access to the history of music, unless people like me revive it. There are very few people to revive it, because you can't earn any money doing it.

I see everybody arguing about what the value of music should be instead of what I think the bigger conversation is, which is that music has value, it's subjective and we're moving to a new era where the audience is taking more responsibility for supporting artists at whatever level.

You learn at a certain point that you have to focus on the business side of music. After getting ripped off a couple of times, you figure out that you need to get a grip on it.

What Spotify pays me is not even enough to pay the musicians playing with me or the people working on the discs. It's not working. Something is going to have to give.

Probably the reason it's a little hard to break away from the album format completely is, if you're getting a band together in the studio, it makes financial sense to do more than one song at a time. And it makes more sense, if you're going to all the effort of performing and doing whatever else, if there's a kind of bundle.

There's really no money per se to be made on records. We used to make a lot of money on records. Now, all of our money is made on touring.

Towards the end of the seventies pop was gaining the momentum and respectability was very high with groups like Yes and Queen who were making "classical" rock records. They were also bringing in big bucks. So the eighties became the "bottom line" decade.