Since the traditional recorded-music business models have drastically changed, there is truly diminished income derived from recorded music by artists - both current and catalog. The touring industry has become much more important as a majority revenue stream and the ancillary fan experiences and promotions that may be derived from it.
Recorded music is more a marketing tool than a revenue source.
I started in a research lab for TV cameras, then I worked at a tape duplication facility. That was the first introduction for me to recorded music and hi-fi.
Record stores are the backbone of the recorded music culture. It's where we go to network, browse around, and find new songs to love. The stores whose staff live for music have spread the word about exciting new things faster and with more essence than either radio or the press. Any artist that doesn't support the wonderful ma and pa record stores across America is contributing to our own extinction.
Hip-hop is a part of rock & roll because it comes from DJ culture. DJ culture is the embodiment of all genres and all recorded music, if you actually pay attention to it.
Some people only work to recorded music because it's so reliable and exactly the same every time, which is exactly why I don't.
I think the fact that Napster is stealing recorded music is something that we have to stop. It's taking money out of my kid's mouth. That is the way I look at it. It's inherently wrong. It's stealing.
Recorded music has always been in a sense promotion for live performance, and some artists have discovered that giving it away is as effective as trying to sell it.
We all listened to a lot of recorded music, especially American jazz, modern jazz, and that's where our studies were and our inspiration came from.
Recorded music is basically free now. I used to tour to promote a CD, but now I make a CD to promote a tour. I've moved on and live with the new reality, but I do get frustrated when people do dumb things.
There's definitely some sort of dissent brewing between record labels, publishing companies and artists [about the compensation they get from streaming services] Spotify is returning a HUGE amount of money [to the record labels]. If we continue growing at our current rate in terms of subscriptions and downloads, we'll overtake iTunes in terms of contributions to the recorded music business in under two years.
Every single year since they invented sound recording it gets better and better. We've always improved it. With MP3, which just sounds awful, it's the first time in the history of recorded music that it sounds worse. It's really - and it's everywhere, it's ubiquitous.
In a way, all recorded music is reduced to the same level, no matter what it is. You find it in the store, you put it on and, "Oh, that's not cool. That's gangsta rap. That's white supremacist punk." But in a way, the content is removed from the intention of the people that made it. That's the commercial level of music.
In 1970, Americans spent about $6 billion on fast food; in 2000, they spent more than $110 billion. Americans now spend more money on fast food than on higher education, personal computers, computer software, or new cars. They spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos, and recorded music—combined.
Records can ruin you. That's why it's important to be as intimately familiar as possible with the history of recorded music, I guess. In a way, it's an argument for record collecting.
Roy Orbison was one of the genuinely nicest persons I've ever known. With one of the most beautiful voices in the history of recorded music he could easily have had an opera star's ego, but he was one of the humblest, kindest, sweetest human beings to grace this planet. This in spite of the enormous tragedies in his life. A brave, beautiful blessing of a man.
Being a man of taste and sophistication, the 80s were objectively, quantifiably, empirically, diagram-it-on-a-blackboard the worst decade in the history of recorded music.
or simply:
