Digital Music Quotes

The subscription model of buying music is bankrupt. I think you could make available the Second Coming in a subscription model and it might not be successful.

When you do mixtapes, a lot of times your fanbase can say, 'We've been getting this for free for so many years, his new album is about to drop, we've listened to it, and we're not going to buy it. We'll download it for free.'

We should be happy. We should be enjoying that there is all this bounty. Somebody can take an iPod and have all the world's music at their beck and call in an instant. What an amazing thing!

A violin is nothing more than a piece of wood and a dead cat. But it's a piece of technology. So when computers came along, in the '70s, I suddenly thought, hang on a second, this is interesting. These things can become an instrument. So I just became very interested in them, and started, playing with electronics.

I have had the good fortune to experience both the limelight and the traffic light as a musician. I did my first recording on my own and it was available at concerts. The second to seventh were released on small and then large labels. My eighth to 14th were done under my own steam once again, but with the benefit of the Internet.

There's no problem with fans and bands. There's a problem with the economics of the outside disruption of the industry.

Amazon.com isn't the same as going down an aisle. The same as record stores. You'll go for Billie Holiday, and you buy Gustav Mahler as you're going out the door.

I'm a computer nerd. I'm behind my computer, like, 12 hours a day making new music.

I think when you go to a store and you go to the Justin Timberlake page and stream it from there, that's great, but that means you went to the store. iTunes Radio lets you discover it without you having to think about it.

I was using computers for music in the '70s, '80s and '90s, and people didn't get it. They thought you should only use computers for your taxes and making pie charts.

Some of my most important musical experiences were from a burnt CD with songs my friend downloaded for me at a terrible digital quality.

The single best thing that has happened in my lifetime in music, after punk rock, is being able to share music, globally for free.

Computers were never designed in the first place to become musical instruments. Within a computer, everything is sterile - there's no sound, there's no air. It's totally code. Like with computer-generated effects in movies, you can create wonders. But it's really hard to create emotion.

We are at a crossroads in the music business: with the rise of the internet, the world we live in has changed, and the past is not coming back. But I see the glass as half-full: the internet and social networking are new avenues for the next Bob Dylan to be born on.

My whole career began because I was always putting my music on the Internet. By the time I had my first tour, I had an audience everywhere I went, because people were listening online.

People don't listen to terrestrial radio. They don't find their music that way. They don't get their news that way. They go to blogs. They go through Sirius/XM. They go through all these different places.

The whole experience of getting an album from an artist you like and listening to it from beginning to end is sort of gone. Now it's piecemeal.

I grew up around electronic instruments. To me, the turntable is an electronic device. At the same time, I had access to drum machines and keyboards through my uncle; then track recorders into computers. At an early age, I was messing with computers more than most hip-hop musicians.

Radio and TV can still push a band, but things need to be shaken up. There is the Internet, but mostly what I see there is little kids on YouTube playing music.

I think that Napster is the greatest invention since sliced bread. Napster, to me, is liberation and freedom for artists.

There's so many people doing interesting things with the Internet and technology, there could be so many ways of making music and listening to it.

With '5 Boroughs,' we were each working on beats, sitting in front of our laptops and samplers.

When I sit behind that electronic drum, it dominates me; there is no innovation in composing music like that.

YouTube is an amazing platform for young musicians - although it's harder to get noticed now that everyone is on it.

A lot of people that buy vinyl today don’t realise that they’re listening to CD masters on vinyl and that’s because the record companies have figured out that people want vinyl, And they're only making CD masters in digital, so all the new products that come out on vinyl are actually CDs on vinyl, which is really nothing but a fashion statement.