I've always treated the music business as a business.
I've been in the music business for 15 years. I've seen it all, man. I've just always been scared of coke. When I was on the road and saw some people do it, I was afraid I would really like it. I was afraid of the consequences.
Many of us would probably not be in the music business - or never would have been in the music business - had The Beatles not demonstrated that this kind of music, or this kind of performance, was actually viable as a career alternative.
I think the music business is becoming more difficult. It's really taken a big hit with piracy, so it's a lot more difficult. I mean, it was kind of an impractical career choice when I did it 25 years ago, but nowadays it's truly reckless.
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.
The music business - and I guess you could say any artistic endeavor - usually rewards those who are on the leading edge of where everything is going, but you can't be too far.
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.
I've certainly stayed a marginal figure, though I became a member of the "surveillance committee" fairly early on. I can actually live pretty well with this, because I'm allowed to work in peace - except when I have to give strings of interviews... And also, I've never sought a position of power in the music business. I became a teacher not so as to found a Kagel School, but to transmit knowledge. My work as a composer should be the only yardstick by which my contribution can be measured.
Coming from the era of vinyl you could argue that everything went wrong in the music business the moment we went digital. The day the first CD came out, it all went downhill in the music industry. Digital destroyed everything.
I don't know if there was really ever a golden age of the music business. Most of what was released has always been garbage and some has been able to get through and last. I don't know that it was much better thirty years ago. The music industry just wasn't as efficient. The music industry was more oddball guys who did it for fun and now they are huge corporations that have become more structured.
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.
[Music] business can drive you to do that if you don't have it here. If you're not strong-minded here, it could steer you the wrong way and when it steers you the wrong way, then it might take forever to get back.
It will be only a matter of time before the music business establishment completely folds.
The bricks and mortar of the music business, they don't exist any longer.
It's very tough for a woman in the music business, and he really was such a motivator from the beginning, when I was super-shy, and he saw a lot in me on a personal level that he knew could carry through on the stage.
Hollywood is about playing the game, and I can't think of any successful actresses who didn't play the game. There's a lot more renegades in the music business, from Patti Smith to Janis Joplin.
I feel like I've survived so much, and been through so much. And sometimes I miss the innocence of those times. Life was different. New York was different. The music business was different. I miss the simplicity of it, the naivete of everyone around me.
There are few words in the music business or in art that I'll say people or some writers are overgenerous with words like 'legend' or 'genius', 'he's a pioneer' and all of that.
Having people around you that are honest with you, and having a team around you that can actually track and communicate where things are working and where they're not working, is really an invaluable asset to an artist's career. I just see it time and again, people who have no clue about that stuff. It's frustrating, and I see the frustration for them. It's a weird thing being an artist, trying to navigate the music business with little to no help.
The tax incentives are things the music business can emulate. If I own Yesterday by the Beatles and I go to a bank and try to borrow $10,000 and use that song as collateral, they wouldn't know what to do. They would run me out of the bank. Whereas if we get specialized people who know how to appraise the value of intellectual property like songs, catalogs and master recordings, they know how to put some type of value on it. They have this in Nashville and Los Angeles. New Orleans is just starting to get it.
I was a time bomb waiting to detonate, burned out, sick of the music business, out of touch with everything and heavily abusing various substances, disillusioned with life, and intensely needed to work on my character. The only way I could see to do that was to withdraw completely from public life as I had known it before.
I vacillate between feeling grateful for what I have in such hard times for the music business and being frustrated that I haven't moved up more quickly. It can be dispiriting to play the same small clubs tour after tour. You think: "When am I going to get to theatres, maybe even arenas?" But maybe that's not on the cards for me, maybe I don't have a wide enough appeal. Most days, I am happy to have the best job in the world.
I used to practice piano for hours, and now, with a synthesizer, you can input the music and the machine perfects the song. That's why we have so many people in the music business who should be plumbers. They don't really understand music because they haven't been trained.
The music business has made a 360. It's a whole 'nother game. It's not nearly what it was. And I fear for it, because, you know, with the advent of the computer and online and downloading and all these things, they have destroyed - that stuff has destroyed the record business, not the music business, but the record business. The music business is well, and it's alive and thriving. Now, I hope something happens to turn it back around to the point whereas it's - you're earning a living from writing your songs, from your work, you know, because it's not like that anymore.
I think for us, we don't feel like the future of music is in the act of being a record company. We feel like the future of the music business is in empowering artists to have better and better tools to communicate with their fans. We want to be people who are saying to artists, "Look, you don't need that company over there to release your album. You can do it this way." Almost more of a band partnership than a label-artist relationship. Not about ownership of content, but about empowerment.
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