Quote

When it all started, record companies - and there were many of them, and this was a good thing - were run by people who loved records, people like Ahmet Ertegun, who ran Atlantic Records, who were record collectors. They got in it because they loved music... Now, record companies are run by lawyers and accountants.

I grew up in an era where the record companies just sold records to everybody, and the whole family bought songs.

I know the history of the record business so well because I followed Billie Holiday into the record studios. It was so primitive compared to the sophisticated business today.

I was a big music fan, but I never bought a bunch of records or was very educated, I guess, on who was who or what was what.

Everyone's talking about how no one is buying records any more, but to me it's quite logical. In the 1990s, music was so hardcore-marketed to a certain group of people that I think a lot of kids felt taken advantage of.

I thought of a lot of people from the same era when I was making a lot of records that had continued making a lot of records. A lot of it didn't seem terribly inspired.

Back then people closed their eyes and listened to music. Today there's a lot of images that go with the music. A lot of music is crap and it's all commercial and the images are all trying to sell the record.

Artists were nurtured back in the '70s. Their music was developed by the record companies.

I don't think that old-fashioned idea of record companies exists any more.