Music Industry Change Quotes

The world has changed a lot since I started making records.I used to go into a studio and there were songs there, chosen for me to see if I liked them. I wasn't encouraged to write.

I remember when I was coming up, the music stores where you could get guitar strings was where I got my records from. Now the place where you get your records from is where you can get your DJ mats and your mixers.

I'm glad about what's happening to the music business. This last crop of people we had in the 90s, who are going away now, they didn't like music. They didn't trust musicians. They wanted something else from it.

It's a scary question for a musician or songwriter today - what does the future hold? It is a strange time in the music business too; it feels like we are all in some kind of transitional period, stuck between old technology and new.

The electric guitar meant that you could have a band with a drummer and a couple of guitars. And that put a lot of horn players out of work.

I grew up in the day when the Beatles sold 1 million singles in a week. And all you've got to do now is sell about 10,000 singles and you're in the charts.

The age of the rock star was coterminous with rock n' roll, which, in spite of all the promises made in some memorable songs, proved to be as finite as the era of ragtime or big bands. The rock era is over. We now live in a hip-hop world.

I remember when metal was something you really had to search out, and now I hear it on car commercials.

It used to be OK to have two or three songs out a year - and those are your singles. Now, they don't want that. They're like, 'OK, I heard that. Next!'

A rock band used to be four guys and a drummer. Now it's five guys sitting around reading manuals!

Since the music industry cracked and fell apart, gasping for the cash flow it had come to expect, much re-thinking has been the order of the day. It is a fine time to be a musician. Like walking through Sodom and Gomorrah while it is still smoking, on your way to the next gig.

I just had to find all my friends that used to be in the business. As I say, the music business didn't die, it just moved to Nashville.

The whole format of entertainment that I did seems to be fading away. The music business of today is completely different when you see the videos and the music.

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.

When I started emceein', you had 500 maybe 1000 rappers in the whole world. Now there's 1.000.000, nahmean?

My dream many years ago would've been to continue to write and record songs in record/album form for years to come, but now records aren't what they were then - and so it doesn't actually feel very good to make a record of songs.

Everything has changed since I started recording in 1972. But the very things that have opened this industry, like the digital platforms to reach more people, have also killed things that were happening before in the recording studio. Now, most of the time, there are no real musicians in the studio; it's people with sequencers and things.

Good jazz has been a big part of my life as far as my interest in music, and... It's kind of weird now with music, the way technology is, with downloading and iPods and electronic distribution, and its kind of - you miss something, I think.

The music industry has changed drastically and that damages young artists. They don't have the same support system that we had. They wanted us to be happy. Today I would have been dropped after the first flop.

It's pretty cool that people will pay for something even though they don't have to. It's totally different now to back in the day. Now you're paying for a record because you believe in the band. In the future that will be the only time people will pay for albums, because there's some kind of connection.

Every record store and record chain has folded; they don't exist. They do not exist. And the only two outlets that would still sell CDs were Best Buy and Wal-Mart. They now have stopped selling it. There's nowhere you can go into a store and buy a CD in America. That's how it is.

The thing that scares me about the way the music industry has changed so much is that I'm afraid that the record, the album, will disappear, and it'll go back to the way it was in the '50s where everything is single-based.

All those years we'd spent learning these chops, and all those gigs in Germany where you'd play all night, and along comes punk. It has nothing to do with that. A lot of people went out of business.

I just think that the way the industry is changing and the world is changing, it might make more sense in two years for bands to have a different band name every time.

Technology has taken its toll on albums in a tough way. The CD format and MTV really played havoc on artists.