For we are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams. —Willy Wonka
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The slow lane may be quicker than the fast lane. So you're dying to get somewhere fast. As an experienced driver, you try to maneuver your car towards the center divide, where you were taught in driving school fast moving cars should reside. And once you arrive you find a housewife in an SUV on the cell phone doing 62. FUCKING UNBELIEVABLE! No, if you want to go fast, on a freeway like the 405, with half a dozen lanes or so, stay to the RIGHT! Everybody feeling entitled, trying to show their MACHISMO, is drifting towards the center, leaving endless holes/open highway on the right. Sounds counterintuitive, I know. But it's true. —Bob Lefsetz
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There's no experience like making the records. You're in there with a bunch of people working together. There's a real bond that has nothing to do with business and only to do with emotion. When it's successful it's an incredible feeling. —Jimmy Iovine
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The bigger the world economy, the more powerful its smallest players. —John Naisbett
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The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side. —Hunter S. Thompson
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The majors will always have deeper pockets, but an indie doesn't have to worry if its cable systems are turning a profit this quarter. That doesn't affect an indie's ability to do a remix on a record, whereas at a major label, sometimes that stuff indirectly does have an effect. So, in a way, we're free from a lot of problems that people who work at major labels face. Now the thing about major labels is that the people who work at them love music no less than the people who work at independent labels. So it's really frustrating for people who work at major labels because there are so many other things going on which can affect the resources available to market that which you really love, which is music. —Steve Greenberg
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We're approaching a wrenching transition. One within which physical sales plummet and digital sales don't make up the difference. And no one is planning for this inevitability. They're just trying to milk the last dollars and cents from the old world. Music is going to have to drop in price dramatically online. So there's no incentive to steal. Or else people will continue to do so, and the majors will become licensing houses and the new music landscape will be invaded by indies, fighting turf wars, to build their touring acts. I'd say change is coming, but it's HERE!—Bob Lefsetz
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If you don't behave in a contrarian and counterintuitive way, you will only ever be moderately successful. —Felix Dennis
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I never met an asshole in the record business I didn't like. —Irving Azoff
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The key in racing is either to be accelerating or braking -- never just coasting along. It's when you're coasting that you have the least amount of control. —Khari Villela
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Cultivating publicity is kind of irritating to people you work with, but having some visibility has helped me to get people to return my phone calls . . . and made me less dependent on any one particular company. —Danny Goldberg
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You can always land on your feet, if you know where the ground is. —George Cukor
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If you don't blow your own horn, somebody else will use it as a spitoon. —Esther Dyson
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Now we have music everywhere, all the time. It's on TV, in elevators, in Walmart, in the doctor's office, and in airplanes. We're inundated with it, and it has become almost, I hate to say it, annoying. It's become like the colorful but totally disposable and therefore meaningless packaging that we discard when we unwrap, say, a Pop Tart. When we throw away that pink-and-white box, how many of us think about, or care about, the time and effort that might have gone into the design, the rendering, the color separation, the printing and everything else? "Yeech," we say to ourselves, "just another Pop Tart box for the trash." —Bob Welch, artistpro
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The cream rises to the top —Al Schmitt
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And if I'd been in the business ten years earlier, I would have succeeded. But the corporate takeovers have cut the heart out of the record business. At least when David Geffen and Chris Blackwell were signing artists to these unconscionable contracts, they were taking some personal responsibility for the art and welfare of their artists. Now, all we're left with are evil and untenable contracts and faceless suits who care only about surviving the latest round of corporate maneuvering. —James Barber, former Geffen Executive
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Last year Americans spent $35 billion on lottery tickets, nearly triple what they spent on all forms of recorded music
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Come here, I think you're beautiful, My door is open wide, Some kind of angel come inside. —Andrew Eldritch
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Music companies and consumers crave a fully satisfying digital music relationship with each other, but it isn't working. Music companies seek to revitalize a slowing pattern of year-to-year growth but are torn between a desire to capitalize on consumer trends and fears of cannibalizing their core CD business. Meanwhile, consumers created their own market for digital music using MP3 files and peer-to-peer file sharing. The value of music has shifted from full-length albums to libraries of songs accessed through subscription services, pushing music from being a product to being a service. —HITS Magaizine
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"The present day Composer refuses to die!" - Edgar Varese - 1921
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The latest strain of this musical epidemic can be traced back to shrewd Svengali Lou Pearlman - a corpulent, repugnant-looking character with the skeevy manner of a prowling pederast. Say what you will about Pearlman's questionable business practices ('N Sync sued him over his creative accounting), but give the man his props for building a multimillion-dollar cottage industry out of the assembly-line packaging of pretty, fresh-faced goy boys who individually possess utterly marginal singing, dancing and songwriting abilities. To rock-starved purists who yearn for the day when musicianship once again becomes in vogue, Pearlman's Frankensteinian monsters are the epitome of what's wrong with the record biz - soulless, synthetic pop acts designed strictly to prey on the pocketbooks and hormonal longings of pubescent girls. —Ian Rothkerch, Salon.com
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Contrary to 'popular' belief, pop music is actually very difficult to produce. The reason for this is that rhythm and dynamics, two of the basic elements of music, are essentially 'locked' in a pop song from beginning to end. Pop songs are so stripped of dynamics that if you look at the waveform, you often see a straight rectangular block from beginning to end. Additionally, when there is zero rhythmic variation in terms of tempo, one must rely on the changes in the beats themselves, i.e. breaks, back beats, and groove. This opens a new door for exploration. It allows musicians to go deeper into the groove itself, and in how it is rendered. The blends and sonic textures become more important too. The trick of making less and less material sound better and better is the order of the day. —Sheldon Steiger
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The box said: Windows 95 or better. So I bought a Macintosh.