Music Business Quotes

People don't buy plastic and paper, they buy emotions.

I wish there had been a music business 101 course I could have taken.

The music business is strictly business.

In Los Angeles, they don't want you to fail, they want you to die.

Punishing people for listening to music is exactly the wrong way to protect the music business.

Anybody that forms a group, writes songs and releases records and says they don't care if people like them are complete liars.

The music business has changed incredibly. There used to be 50 record companies. Now there's only three, and it's just getting smaller and smaller. But then again, you have the Internet, so anybody who has music can get it out there.

I feel like I've survived so much, and been through so much. And sometimes I miss the innocence of those times. Life was different. New York was different. The music business was different. I miss the simplicity of it, the naivete of everyone around me.

The problem that I have is with the music business. For some reason it seems almost impossible to get anything, any music, released which includes improvisation or soloing.

My advice to anyone wanting to get into the music business, is always be ready to learn and remain humble.

Nothing will prepare you for singing the truth like about 35 years in the music business, financial troubles and a couple trips to jail, ... It will get you really humble and really truthful, and gets you ready to sing out about who and what saved you.

I worked hard all my life as far as this music business. I dreamed of the day when I could go to New York and feel comfortable and they could come out here and be comfortable.

The only way to get ahead in the music business these days is to call up all your friends. To pool your resources.

Swimming upstream in the music business is a hard thing to do.

I think it's a reflection of the music business in general, which to me seems very fragmented.

Forget about surviving 40 years in the music business. Just surviving 27 years of Nicole Richie has been a struggle-and-a-half, I want to tell you. I stand here as a survivor, I want you to know, for all the parents out there.

I've withdrawn many times. Part of me is a monk, and part a performing flea! The fear in the music business is that you don't exist if you're not at Xenon with Andy Warhol.

New generations have unprecedented power to make great changes. Take the music business for example. The new generations have toppled the music industry by file sharing, downloading, and Myspace. Rock 'n' roll belongs to the people.

There are few words in the music business or in art that I'll say people or some writers are overgenerous with words like 'legend' or 'genius', 'he's a pioneer' and all of that.

There's always peripheral things that you like that you don't know, but starting with whatever his British influences are, are some of my favourite artists, and the American things are what I grew up on as well. In the end, for me, it's those foundations of the music business - those things that are a lot of the foundations of what music today is. You can hear a bit of all of those things that we talk about in almost all music today.

Education is extremely important, especially in my business, the music business.

If this company is about anything, it's about discipline and staying focused.

I’ve done well, I’ve been disappointed, and I think it all goes back to you. Of course the labels are going to be the labels. It’s the music business. You are a business. That’s what they do. So you’ve got to protect yourself.

I don't relate to what's left of the music business. There doesn't seem to be any point to it anymore. The business that I grew up in and loved, we made records a different way - there were record companies, there were stores where you could buy albums.

I am definitely less and less interested in music made by people that exist today, people that are living. I just see them as part of the whole stupid process of the music business, desperate (even if they feign indifference) to get noticed, trying to "make it" in the stinking music business, to become "famous" etc, and it disgusts me.

The music business, and the travel that comes with it, is stressful, challenging, redundant, exhausting, exciting, and often very depressing.

I think the music business will eventually crush me, but I [smiles]... I'm ready.

The most important thing is that you make sure you follow the music, which is a musician's way of saying follow your heart. The two things are intertwined. You know, when you even mention the phrase "music business," the older you get, the sourer it sounds. It's a terrible business, you know. Music and business have nothing to do with each other; there's no correlation, so it's always a rub. I would encourage people, don't be swayed by the music business. If you're truly, in your heart, a musician, stay one, and let the business find you.

You know how it is with drawers and labels in the music business. They don't want anything to be complicated. They just want it simple, as simple as possible.

I've been in the music business for 15 years. I've seen it all, man. I've just always been scared of coke. When I was on the road and saw some people do it, I was afraid I would really like it. I was afraid of the consequences.

There's so many people in the music business or even in general who will tell you that you can't do this or that just because you haven't already had success but I feel like anyone can do anything they put their mind to as long as they stay devoted and stay passionate.

The movie business is very difficult but the music business is just impossible. So I'll play in bands and record and play songs with other people, but for me it's a form of expression that all I need is me. I don't need cameras or agents, I can just have a piano and sing and feel totally verified.

I think the music business is probably not happy with what we've done, because the people buying the record have actually got to pick what they want to buy, rather than being told what they should buy.

You will have to look a long way before you find a bunch of scum-suckers more greedy, humourless and deserving of death than the suits in the music business.

The music business used to carry a certain amount of brotherly love, but it isn't that way now.

The bricks and mortar of the music business, they don't exist any longer.

The music business is suffering because fewer artists are being invested in. Labels are putting in less money, taking fewer risks and signing half as many artists as they did 10 years ago. Everything is risk averse right now and there are two ways to deal with a business situation like this: either reduce your risk or increase your return. They're reducing their risk to the bone and looking for ways with their 360 deals to increase their return. They're still not making money. Artists are suffering. Labels, or music investors, are suffering.

One of the best things about Kickstarter and crowdfunding and the collapse of the music business is a lot of artists like me have been forced to face our own weird mess about ourselves and what we thought it meant to become musicians.

Having people around you that are honest with you, and having a team around you that can actually track and communicate where things are working and where they're not working, is really an invaluable asset to an artist's career. I just see it time and again, people who have no clue about that stuff. It's frustrating, and I see the frustration for them. It's a weird thing being an artist, trying to navigate the music business with little to no help.

Music is what is going to save me," "On the bad days, when I have to look at the cold, hard facts of life, I see that this is not the music business I came up in and I have to be very, very objective and detached and say, 'what's good about it and what's bad about it?' Mostly, I'm finding it good that it's not the same old music business, because the music business I came up in really didn't advance anything I was doing, and I don't think it was particularly kind to a lot of artists.

The death of the music business was insane, but audio recordings have been around now for maybe 120 years. Books have been around for, what, nine centuries? So they're more entrenched than music.

The unifying thread through all these different aspects of music business is just my attraction toward working with sounds and designing new scary, evil, dark sounds.

When you're in the music business, everything is very personal, because you are invested in everything; there's a very deep, personal attachment to your music.

Some artists are told what to like and told definitions of what the music business is. That's a problem. Music is artistry, and you want your music heard, your act known. But artists don't know. They are ignorant the minute they sign a contract.

I'd say we [Apple Inc.] are the most creative of the technology companies and definitely the most artist-friendly. Almost everyone in the music business uses a Mac and everyone has an iPod.

We live in an age of music for people who don't like music. The record industry discovered some time ago that there aren't that many people who actually like music. For a lot of people, music's annoying, or at the very least they don't need it. They discovered if they could sell music to a lot of those people, they could sell a lot more records.

For the music business, social networking is brilliant. Just when you think it's doom and gloom and you have to spend millions of pounds on marketing and this and that, you have this amazing thing now called fan power. The whole world is linked through a laptop. It's amazing. And it's free. I love it. It's absolutely brilliant.

My goal in this music business is to be here as long as I'm alive. I want my music to be here. I want to be the Michael Jackson and the Prince of hip-hop. I want to be a legend. I want to change the world. I want to give them songs that mean something.

My advice would be if you want to pursue a career in the music business, don't.

I have always considered myself a fast learner. I try to retain and absorb as much information and knowledge about the [music] business as I can. I don't want to just sit back and have other people do the hard work for me. I try to be involved in every process of my career as possible. I run my own social media, record, and try to vocal produce myself as much as possible, write my own songs, style myself, and learn the business side. If I didn't do acting or music, I was going to school for business. God has put me on this path and I can honestly say I wake up every day doing what I love.