Quotes & Sayings About The Music Business

You know that one don't play music just for the hours to pass. But you play music because you are in love with music and luckily if it happens that people like what I'm proposing, then I'm happy. Although music is business, yet you don't start thinking about money from the initial stages when you are in music. First propose to the people what they want and if they like it, then the money comes later. — Manu Dibango

Only Getting the A and Z with out the B through Y, leaves you SOL. — Loren Weisman

It is a tough city to live in (Detroit) but a great city to be around. There is so much promise. There just needs to be a movement to help push the city beyond the automobile industry. The music business needs to learn how to support itself. — MC Serch

Barry Manilow is a guy who's had a tremendous longevity that few have had in the music business. I'm in awe of what he does. — Dave Koz

Do not assume that people are seeing you. The more you can clarify, optimize, and engage your fans and strangers with branded marketing and merchandise, the better chance you have of being seen and then heard. — Loren Weisman

I decided to start my own label because so many people with talent come to me wanting to know how they can get in the music business. — Mary J. Blige

I think Sean Parker damaged the music business with Napster. — Curtis Jackson

The music business is not a good place for people who don't know things. — Mary J. Blige

I think it's become much harder because I'm more afraid of every step I take. I'm more aware of its ramifications, I'm more aware of the less creative aspects of music - like the business-side of things for example. — Zach Condon

Paste Magazine needs to stay in business! It's the first non-sensational quality music and film publication that doesn't only attempt to appeal to middle-aged male Bob Dylan completionists! And there are still many of us who love to pick up a print magazine instead of going online. — Nina Persson

I'd actually say that every musician is a human being, and that not everybody likes being social. But with music, there are all these ingredients to the business that have nothing to do with writing songs or playing an instrument. — Amanda Palmer

A woman's two cents worth is worth two cents in the music business. — Loretta Lynn

Writing is not work. In fact, there's nothing better. Writing is something that if the music business went completely away tomorrow - radio stations quit existing and music quit being popular and it was old hat - I would still write songs. — Toby Keith

I believe in God and the whole business but I love women best, music and science next, whiskey next, God fourth, and my fellowman hardly at all. — Walker Percy

Before I'd even started doing music or having opportunities with my own music, I was studying production and business and stuff anyway. I knew there were so many jobs within the music industry - songwriting or session playing or working at a label - and I was really interested in how it all works. — Gabrielle Aplin

The music business is one of a few places where everything you've heard about it seems entirely cliche, but it's true. — Patrick Stump

My real name is Chord Overstreet. I actually got my name because my dad is in the music business as a songwriter. I was the third one in my family born, and there are three notes in a chord, so that's how they came up with my name. — Chord Overstreet

We're the McDonalds of rock. Were always there to satisfy, and a billion served. — Paul Stanley

I'm a prostitute. Do you know what, it really is basically I just really like to work! I'm thrilled that there's a variety. It's why I got into this business to begin with, because I really don't have the discipline or intellect to have a 9-to-5 job. But I came from a classical music background and I merged that to theatre, it kind of opened up the door to a lot of different possibilities. — Jason Graae

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. — Dean Wareham

Many years later after the sell-outs, betrayals, and hatred which would tear us apart, when our brotherhood had been destroyed, I'd always look back and remember that night. That fucking wild night at the KeyClub, when the smoke stung my eyes but my world was full of nothing but blind hope. When life was not a mockery, but a very real fire which flamed through my veins like the most incredible drug... the night when Kelly-Lee Obann, drunk, high and barely 20 the time, looked out through his hair with a terrible nakedness and said to me;
"We're not gonna make it out of this alive. You know that, right? — H. Alazhar

I decided to come back and teach goodness in this business. To teach love, because music is the universal language. We are God's bouquet, and through music we become one. — Little Richard

But what you realise after you've been in the business for a while is that people develop opinions about you that don't have anything to do with your music, they like or dislike you for a million reasons, they like or dislike you for your last record. — Adam Duritz

When I was a kid, a lot of my parents' friends were in the music business. In the late '60s and early '70s - all the way through the '70s, actually - a lot of the bands that were around had kids at a very young age. So they were all working on that concept way early on. And I figured if they can do it, I could do it, too. — Slash

Great music can come from anywhere around the globe. And there has always been a music business. It just wasn't recorded, nor was it centered in New York, London, Los Angeles or Nashville but rather St Petersburg, Vienna, Berlin, Milan and Paris. — Seymour Stein

Walter turned on the radio: electric violins wailing, twisted romance, the four-square beat of heartbreak. Trite suffering, but suffering nonetheless. The entertainment business. What voyeurs we have all become. — Margaret Atwood

It's true that I tend to daydream. I'm the same person in business as I am in music: I can be distracted and absentminded. It's my style. — Gordon Getty

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. — Mary J. Blige

At the end of the day, there's only a few major stars in the music business, and then there's all these people that are aspiring to be that. — John Legend

I don't know if it's my music, my lyrics, my sound, and knowing the music business the way I do-all I can say is, my career has lasted way longer than I expected. — Barry White

I never pigeonholed myself - the only reason you'd want to pigeonhole is to monetize your business and, as a person, I don't see the importance of doing that. My music took off above the rest of those things: You can just make a song, put it on a CD, and get it out to all these people. — M.I.A.

I never really expected any of the music business to happen, but I'm glad it did. It was a very cool thing to happen. It was a hobby for me. I used to do it to meet girls. If you had long hair and could play a guitar then you got girls. That's how I started. Then I fell in love with the music and got carried away. — John Martyn

Being a professional musician doesn't mean you spend 12 hours a day playing music. It means you spend up to 12 hours a day taking care of business, dealing with litigation, with the various characters who've stolen your interests, or fending off hostile lawsuits from former members of the band. — Robert Fripp

My father being in the movie business, I thought being an actor would be great. But when I started singing to people in coffeehouses, you know, singing folk music and then, later, singing songs that I started to write myself, I felt more than an affinity for it. — David Crosby

The unified field theory that ties together Jobs personality and products begins with his most salient trait: his intensity. His silences could be as searing as his rants; he had taught himself to stare without blinking. Sometimes this intensity was charming, in a geeky way, such as when he was explaining the profundity of Bob Dylan's music or why whatever product he was unveiling at that moment was the most amazing thing that Apple had ever made. At other times it could be terrifying, such as when he was fulminating about Google or Microsoft ripping of Apple. — Walter Isaacson

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. — Jeremy Renner

We are pushing ahead as fast as we can for all audiences, whether for the business user, the child, or the digital music enthusiast. — Jim Allchin

What happens in the music business is that if you step out of your little spot to do something else, the sand falls right into where you stood and you're gone, you're history. — Nancy Sinatra

I finished high school, moved to Nashville for college, and set out to break into the music business. Every night when I called home with news of my experiences, my mom and dad would encourage me to keep taking those small steps. — Trisha Yearwood

In those days, if you wanted a new car or a holiday, you'd phone up the office and they'd send you some cash. You never had a bank account. I don't know anyone from the music business in the Seventies that it didn't happen to. — Ozzy Osbourne

I never even went to high school because I went straight from middle school into the music business. I don't really know what it is supposed to be like. — Cheyenne Kimball

Turns out I really like bookstores. You know, I meet a lot of people in my line of work. A lot of folks pass through Alice Island, especially in the summer. I've seen movie people on vacation and I've seen music people and newspeople, too. There ain't nobody in the world like book people. It's a business of gentlemen and gentlewoman. — Gabrielle Zevin

You know, the music business is like the Lotto. Just put your numbers down and sometimes they hit, and sometimes they don't. There's just no rhyme or reason. — Barry McGuire

I'm an indie artist with major distribution, so one foot in the extreme major music business and one foot in the abyss of indie artists. — John Oates

I was a good amateur but only an average professional. I soon realized that there was a limit to how far I could rise in the music business, so I left the band and enrolled at New York University. — Alan Greenspan

I wanted to be great. And I loved Nashville, so that made it easy. I loved the music business. It made it easy for me to stay and make a life here. — Brandy Clark

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. — Charlie Clouser

People are people, and I get a bit annoyed that the music business only focuses in on the big metropolises. I find that people that don't live in big cities are just as likely to enjoy music as people that do live in big cities. — Eddi Reader

I suppose that by being absent from the music business, it appeared that I just dropped out, but really I never did. I was continuously working and doing various things. — Cat Stevens

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. — James Taylor

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

Most true artists care about music as a pure, passionate art form, but can get caught in the trap of the business. Which, sadly, has now become more important than the artist or even the music itself. — Rosanna Arquette

I would say I know nothing about the music business, in a nice sort of way. I totally forgot I was in that music video. That's so funny. — Zooey Deschanel

I hate the business part of music. Music is just like the streets. There's loyal and disloyal people, people saying one thing and then don't do it. — Schoolboy Q

She was the kind
To tell it like it is
To kiss and tell
To kiss and kill
To kill with kindness

She was the kind
To get things through her thick skull
To work her fingers to the bone
To work on her back
To never take it lying down

She was the kind
To lay down the law
To get down on her knees
To get up on her feet
To give an inch and take a mile

She was the kind
To stand up for herself
To sit down strike
To go to the wall
To take it to the limit

She was the kind
To take it too far
To drop off the face of the earth
To face the music
To hit rock bottom

She was the kind
To get back on that horse and ride it
To get up on her high horse
To get down to business
To turn the world upside down — Heid E. Erdrich

I really worked with icons in the music business, which really had a strong effect on me. It wasn't just pick-up gigs. — Kevin Eubanks

Singers come and go; the music business waxes and wanes. The blues are popular and unpopular, often at the same time. — Linda Barnes

I'm a binge writer. I work in the music business fulltime, in artist management and developing songwriters and recording artists, and so juggling my job I carve out as much time as I can on the weekends. — Ruta Sepetys

All movies, when they're about the music business, tend to have a bit of a wide latitude in terms of how things really were. — Chris Squire

When I was touring and spending so much time on the bus, I realized that I actually knew very little about the industry that I'm in so I set out to educate myself on the music business. — Ty Herndon

I never had the feeling I ever had to make a dime doing anything. — Rick Rubin

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. — Simon Cowell

You've sinned, I suppose, but your punishment has been out of all proportion. They have turned you into something other than a human being. You have no power of choice any longer. You are committed to socially acceptable acts, a little machine capable only of good. And I see that clearly - that business about marginal conditionings. Music and the sexual act, literature and art, all must be a source now not of pleasure but of pain. — Anthony Burgess

When I was 20, I thought anyone in the music business over 25 is past it. Then at 30, you think anyone still doing it at 35 is ridiculous. Suddenly, you find yourself at 48 and still doing it, so I don't know what to say, really. — Vince Clarke

I'd just like to inspire people to be themselves and do what they want and not conform to the rigid guidelines of the music or entertainment business. — Juliana Hatfield

The music business is motivated by money. Music is motivated by energy and feelings. — Erykah Badu

I got out of the music industry many years ago. I had a charlatan for a producer who I wanted nothing to do with. He's dead now, so I guess I can't beat that horse any more. It left a very bad taste in my mouth, so I just went on about my business doing what I do and not involving myself with record companies, except for distribution. — Leon Redbone

It's a funny line when you're walking - the creativity, the subjectivity versus the objectivity, creativity versus the business, and recognizing that you are in the music business, so there are certain things that you have to acquiesce to on the business side and certain creative decisions that you have to make for the purposes of serving the business side of it. — Lupe Fiasco

The only thing that was economic, I might say, about my music career, aside from the fact that I did everybody's tax returns in the band, was the decision I made to leave the music business on economic grounds. — Alan Greenspan

One might be tempted to think that the many slights and rejections we scientists must suffer are somehow a necessary part of our education. But I don't think that way anymore. My experience with the music business has taught me to cherish every bit of feedback I can get, and not to think of the hundreds of unreturned phone calls or ignored pitches I must face as signs of personal failings. It was this change of perspective,
and the pressure it removed from my life, that first made me want to try systematically applying what I learned in the music business to the world of science. — Marc J. Kuchner

You know, my goal, once I leave the music business, is like, 'Man, Lupe didn't lead us astray.' It comes directly from Islam: leading people astray is the worst thing you could do. Especially in perpetuity; like, your music continues to go on and live without you. That risk is too great for me; I'm gonna keep it positive. — Lupe Fiasco

Most people involved in the music business, and it's probably not just the music business ... aren't necessarily people that I like. — Buzz Osborne

I don't live in as much fear as I used to. I'm not afraid of the music business. Life is too damn short. I know what's important, and the tasks are very clear. — Kathy Mattea

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. — Larry Mullen

I have very much enjoyed being in the music business in different roles through five different decades. — Peter Asher

You just plant a few seeds, cultivate the shoots, and watch your career grow and branch out. It takes time and dedication. There are no overnight success stories in the music business! — Christopher Tin

The people on the business side in the music business are kind of different from the theatre business. I think it's partly because there are different pressures on the industries. — Tim Curry

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. — Chuck D

Yeah, man I am going to be writing a book soon. The reality of being in a rock band in the music business'. — Steve Brown

I love commercial music! I can dissect it and criticize it with any critic in the business. But without any thought, I just enjoy it. It's folk music. That's what I'm doing, folk music. I'm not intellectualizing it ... and making it into a phoney art form. I'm just doing the music I enjoy. — John Lennon

I feel like once the song is done, you put it out there and if people want to do bizarre remixes, if people want to make strange videos, great. You know, like chaos theory applied to the music business. — Moby

That folk music led to learning to play, and making things up led to what turns out to be the most lucrative part of the music business - writing, because you get paid every time that song gets played. — Jackson Browne

In every interview I've got to explain something about being white but still being into hip hop. It's gone way beyond the musical aspect of the business. And I'm as critical about music as everybody else is. — Brian Austin Green

I am passionate about finding undiscovered and talented artists. I want to help those artists get to the next level and provide existing artists with a new way to reach fans. I wanted to partner with the Cutting Edge Group because they share my vision and have a proven track record in innovation in the music business. — Michelle Phan

The more years you put behind you, hopefully making music that surpasses what you did before, you're playing bigger places and it kind of weirdly becomes a business. — Mark Lanegan

There are peaks and valleys in anything and that is especially true for the music business. It is very inconsistent. But if you are wise, you can let those downs really bring you to another level of your personality. — Bryan White

There have been times when I've made special arrangements to meet people in music, film, business or politics, and I'll continue to do so if the people are sincere. — Frederick Lenz

The music business is a place where the artists are all treated like we're working for the people who are working for us. That can obviously be exaggerated when you're a female. — Sinead O'Connor

The difference between me and other people in my generation is instead of saying the Internet's killing the record business, I say, 'Who cares about the record business, the Internet is enhancing music.' — Daryl Hall

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. — Paul Weller

The nature of the music business is such that it's better to have a few chances for some things to be successful than just one, and that's kind of been my attitude all along. — Adam Schlesinger

I wanted to do an acting role in a movie that had nothing to do with the music business or in which I would play a singer or a songwriter. When I act, I don't even want to be thought of as Ne-Yo. — Ne-Yo

I'm from a little island off of Massachusetts, Nantucket. It's hard getting into the music business from there, but my parents took me to songwriting festivals because I would write and produce my own music. — Meghan Trainor

Steve Jobs gave a small private presentation about the iTunes Music Store to some independent record label people. My favorite line of the day was when people kept raising their hand saying, "Does it do [x]?", "Do you plan to add [y]?". Finally Jobs said, "Wait wait - put your hands down. Listen: I know you have a thousand ideas for all the cool features iTunes could have. So do we. But we don't want a thousand features. That would be ugly. Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It's about saying NO to all but the most crucial features. — Derek Sivers

There's much more money being brought into the advertising and communications business than in the music industry. — Steve Stoute

I definitely want my career to continue to branch out. I've had the pleasure of working in different areas of entertainment, from being in the music business as a teenager in a girl group to doing Broadway. — Naturi Naughton

I've always just adored music. It's my first love, really. I admire and respect people in the music business. You really have to work hard and diligently. Sometimes actors can be lazy and get away with it, but you can't do that if you're a musician. — Blythe Danner

The music business can be very cold. And it doesn't honor its elders. — Brenda Lee

Elvis Presley is all there is. There just ain't no more. Everything starts and ends with Elvis. He wrote the book. He is everything to do and not to do in the music business. — Bruce Springsteen

Without a doubt, because now in the music business talent and hard work isn't enough. There is just a lot of luck and marketing money involved in making any artist break. "Fall Down" is about a relationship, but you could certainly apply it to the relationship we've had with each other and throughout our career. — Jason C. Miller