Music Executives Quotes

You know you're getting older when the record executives start getting younger.

The music business used to be filled with people who love music.

There aren't enough people who are scaring the kind of people who work at these record companies.

Over the course of my 20-year history as an executive in the music business and as the owner of a firm that specializes in in-culture advertising, I have come to the conclusion that the Grammy Awards have clearly lost touch with contemporary popular culture.

In my career, people in the record business have been rockin' in the same ol' boat. They all crooks - I'll say it clear and loud - especially the big ones.

The fact that people still know us is, in my opinion, a result of our music and of the big money that runs the music industry today. The people who control the industry are accountants who recycle everything in new, nostalgic packages, and everything else, to make more money.

I knew how the suits used to talk about the artists, with barely concealed contempt. So I knew what was waiting for me round the corner. Because I wasn't one of those very unusual people like Neil Diamond or Elton John, whose careers just seem to span the decades. I knew I wasn't one of them.

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

We need more Rocafellas; we need more Bad Boys.

Record companies, they're just like lemmings.

All music industry places are the same, really. They have the same dynamics and the same concerns and the same needs.

It's a younger generation running the show, and I miss the generation we had in the '70s. They were really very honorable guys, like Neal Bogart and Bill Graham, people who will never be around again.

You gotta remember: the record industry, in order for it to really thrive, has got to attract great people.

The Philadelphia/New York world of the music business is a tough place to be.

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.

The movie industry can be tricky and occasionally creepy, and I have this sense that the music industry is just shady as hell. I don't want to be a part of it.

I've worked with many powerful men in the music industry.

In the music industry, you meet some not very nice people, some very strange characters.

I think Def Jam happened to be one of the labels that really didn't have a good grip on things that were going on. I'll say that - that's my political answer.

All movies, when they're about the music business, tend to have a bit of a wide latitude in terms of how things really were.

There are good people in radio and the record companies, but there are others who are completely in the wrong job and holding music up in the process.

I wound up becoming an A&R man at London Records in the 1990s, during the boom of Britpop, the last great gold rush of the music industry. I saw incredible greed and terrible behaviour. I was greedy and terribly behaved.

Music Row gets dragged through the dirt, but they're just trying to survive.

A lot of record company people, even though they're our age, want to be perceived as young hip guys, and they're hurting the business.

I find it so funny how people that don't write the music, and have no involvement in it, can make such huge decisions on behalf of artists.