Music Revenues Quotes

My biggest frustration is the lack of scale in the music industry. The fact that no one has sold 100 million copies of an album is frustrating.

There are half a billion people that listen to music online and the vast majority are doing so illegally. But if we bring those people over to the legal side and Spotify, what is going to happen is we are going to double the music industry and that will lead to more artists creating great new music.

Those 'Pledge' records did good for me, and they're the foundation that this Killer Mike is built on, but I was judging myself on physical sales and didn't understand that music sales were declining overall.

Because record companies do not routinely release sales figures the way film studios do, the weekly charts in trade publications like 'Billboard' provide the best independent measure of record appeal.

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

Recorded music is more a marketing tool than a revenue source.

Some artists and indie musicians see Spotify fairly positively - as a way of getting noticed, of getting your music out there where folks can hear it risk-free.

It's not a problem if 20,000 people heard my music for free, but it's a huge problem if 20,000 people never heard my music.

We've always had big gaps between records.

The CD, it should be noted, was born out of greed. It was devised to prop up record sales on the expectation of people replenishing their record collections with CDs of albums they had already purchased.

The value of streaming platforms is estimated at a few billion dollars, and creators can only afford a pizza without pepperoni at the end of the year with the revenues. Without musicians, all those platforms wouldn't exist, so we urgently need an appropriate and sustainable business model for musicians for the 21st century.

People say, 'How's the record doing?' In the old days you'd say, 'We're at 600,000, it's doing great.' You don't say those things anymore. Those numbers are gone.

I have never made a cent off a record in my life. I have never recouped enough, and I never sold enough.

But I can say that the business has changed drastically since I started at 8 years old. Everything from the way you tour to how you make a record and how you release the music.