Tom Junod Quotes

With iTunes and Spotify and Pandora and this and that, you don't need to buy CDs any more.

I don't even remember the last time I bought an album, honestly.

Music is the soundtrack to your life. It's not going to go anywhere. But the way people are purchasing music has changed. It's not the same anymore. It will never be the same.

Napster is a consumer revolt. Napster is about my right to have this music and to share if I've paid for it. You know, so we start to see our decisions, our opportunities, our every choice is a consumer choice.

You have an entire generation of kids who grew up with the idea that music is something that you can download for free.

Napster is great so long as they put out tracks on there that have been officially released. I don't really mind people downloading my music; I also see it as a compliment. And if you are a real music lover, you want to have the original CD anyway 'cause then you feel more connected to the artist.

Records aren't selling anymore; people are burning music.

I get sick when I think about someone going to iTunes and downloading two songs off our album. It's not meant to be listened to that way.

I pay for all my music.

People don't buy CDs so much anymore because it's easy to download everything. So, while the record industry is declining, the music is heard a lot more than before.

My kids don't really buy albums. They buy singles.

Most people didn't have the bandwidth to download whole albums. And so it brought back this cherry picking idea that the audience would focus on certain songs and possibly be the impetus behind what eventually got on AM radio: the single or whatever.

When you think of Napster, you think of music. But the first thing that struck me was that this was an important case not only for the music industry but for the whole Internet.

Any time that you can give the consumer more of what they want, it's a good thing. I said from Day 1 that the unbundling of the album is a good thing.

People now have been conditioned to believe they should only buy one song at a time, that nobody can make an entire record that would merit you paying, you know, $7, $8, $10 when CDs in the '90s were $18, $19 and people bought millions and millions and millions of them.

The thing that I've always been slightly frustrated with, was that the idea of a CD is kind of confined to a material possession that you can put on a shelf. And the idea of music, for me, is always about both the communication and the sharing of content. And so the interactive part is missing.

The big news already broke. The file-sharing and all that stuff, it's a done deal. And I think figuring out how to make that a fair exchange for the people that make music is still an issue.

I feel like, as musicians, we need to fight the Spotify thing. I feel that in some ways what's happening in the mainstream is the last gasp of the old industry. Once that does finally die, which it will, something else will happen.

The thing that happened with the music business, there are no stores anymore where you can buy music. It's all an online business now, and that's, you know - the bookstore culture is a very vibrant part of the American experience that we're very reluctant to see go away.

The great thing about the Internet is that it allows people to find and consume music.

Gone are the days when you'd have to tune in to a mad illegal radio station late at night to be able to hear the rapper of your choice. That's all changed now. That's all gone out of the window. And I feel like I represent that change. I represent the era of iPods and Shuffle and things like that.

Digital downloading of music has affected us all in adverse ways.

There's no doubt that the ready availability of music online has created a thousand more opportunities than it's destroyed.

Between the record companies being the way they are and the fact that people can just download one song instead of buying a whole album, it's hard to make a good living nowadays.

People want to listen to a lot of music and do whatever they want with it. They don't want DRM, they don't want subscriptions. They don't want a player that only can do this but can't do that and you only have one copy. They don't want that. You know? I don't want that.