Top 71 Quotes About Commercial Music
#1. Pressure is high and jobs are at stake. There is nothing wrong with having commercial music to pitch for those situations, as well as for ad campaigns.
Wendy Starland
#2. Commercial music, for the most part, is popular music and you always have to keep that in mind.
Kenneth Edmonds
#3. 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
#4. At the same time all this was happening, there was a folk song revival movement goingon, so the commercial music industry was actually changed by the Civil Rights Movement.
Bernice Johnson Reagon
#5. The commercial music world which I had been a part of for so many years lost its sparkle. My focus became the creation of music which would slow down the brainwaves, so inducing a state similar to when we mediate.
John R. Levine
#6. Commercial music is music that a lot of people connect to at the same time, but that doesn't mean it has to be something shallow or without personality.
Robyn
#7. The commercial music video industry is very hard to break into, and until you break in, that first job is the hardest thing in the world to get.
Joseph Kosinski
#8. Work in nightclubs was interesting. There were interesting people and places, but by and large, the commercial music experience.
Pete Seeger
#9. I think some people record songs and make records a certain way to cater to radio. If you're born to make commercial music that's cool. But if you're born to not make commercial records, maybe you're meant to cater to another market.
Bryan White
#10. I'm trying to fuse popular and commercial music and just make very creative music. It's popular music: it's everything for everybody.
Theophilus London
#11. I have always made commercial music. The people who vote for the Grammy nominees are mostly in their 40s and have other jobs or are musicians themselves. They like music that they can relate to - they like commercial music.
Al Walser
#12. My policy is not how fast you play, it's not how much you play but it's what you play and where you play it ... play for the commercial side of the music ... the word I still use today is called "simplicity" .. it is so important that you use simplicity in your playing and in your music ...
James Burton
#13. The world thinks that music is a commercial commodity. I'm glad that is not my code.
Sun Ra
#14. The success of Watermark surprised me. I never thought of music as something commercial; it was something very personal to me.
Enya
#15. I've heard some tunes in recent years that were pretty close to that same idea. The idea was you turn on the radio and you want to hear some music and up comes a commercial.
Mose Allison
#16. When I look at commercial studios, I think, "Oh, they're all so nice and tidy," but it's because they don't actually write music in them.
Aphex Twin
#18. [Commercial radio] is owned by one or two corporations now, and they're not in the music business. They're in the advertising business ... So let's not kid ourselves. If you want to hear music, go buy a guitar.
Elvis Costello
#19. Making music, dancing, the theater, conversation, proper and urbane deportment, these were cultivated here as particular arts. It was not the military, nor the political, nor the commercial, that was predominant in the life of the individual and of the masses.
Stefan Zweig
#20. Watch MTV and you can see what the music scene is like in England. The Spice Girls? Not a lot of creativity in the commercial area. There are still great musicians in England, but not a lot being heard that much.
Jimmy Carl Black
#21. Rock became an incredible commercial success, people just became bored with serious music, and it was forgotten.
Henry Flynt
#22. The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?
David Sarnoff
#23. I never do anything to strictly satisfy a fickle, ever-changing commercial world. I do the music I like to play. It's the only way I feel comfortable existing in the industry.
Charlie Hunter
#24. Mars is really different, into art. Lydia Lunch is more energy. James Chance is more commercial in a different way, in funk and jazz. They were all doing original things, trying to create their own sound and music. I think they're all great.
Ikue Mori
#25. When reggae was introduced to the world, it was a voice of the oppressed, a music with integrity that you can enjoy holistically. Throughout the years, what has become commercial kind of strayed from the integrity.
Stephen Marley
#26. It's great to have other people's help. Then the music gets heard. There's a lot more commercial support for that now.
Madeleine Peyroux
#27. The truth is an artist like me who doesn't get the type of promotion that we see more commercial artists receive, and especially in this climate of the music business, you have to be creative about how you promote yourself.
Chrisette Michele
#28. The people who were learning from me tended to be more commercial performers who were gonna rip off the salient idea to do it in a way that will sell, but they weren't going for the music.
Iggy Pop
#29. I seriously hate pop music and all things super-commercial.
Ani DiFranco
#30. The style of music that we're playing, this progressive metal style, has always been an upstream battle for us. We don't usually get a lot of commercial exposure.
John Petrucci
#31. Anytime you look at anything that's considered artistic, there's a commercial world around it: the ballet, opera, any kind of music. It can't exist without it.
Steve Martin
#32. Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
Ralph Ellison
#33. As I've indicated, most books go out of print within one year. The same is true of music and film. Commercial culture is sharklike. It must keep moving. And when a creative work falls out of favor with the commercial distributors, the commercial life ends.
Lawrence Lessig
#34. I was in college, and very disappointed. I majored in commercial art and interior design for three or four years. At that time, it seemed the thing I really wanted to do, production design, just wasn't available in the U.K., so I turned to music.
Eric Burdon
#35. I'm a commercial artist, both in music and art.
Grace Slick
#36. To say that an artist sells out means that an artist is making a conscious choice to compromise his music, to to weaken his music for the sake of commercial gain.
Ken Burns
#37. Public radio is the last oasis of free and independent music. For satellite radio channels, you have to subscribe; commercial stations are as corporate as basic cable.
Nellie McKay
#38. 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.
Neil Young
#40. I don't think too much about how it might exist in the world in a commercial sense - I more just try and focus on making music that I love and trying to put it out into the world.
Moby
#41. I'm a provincial. I live very much like a hermit: reading, listening to music, working in the cutting room, writing, commercial work - which doesn't take up that much time.
Orson Welles
#42. Commercial to the core, Elvis was the kind of singer dear to the heart of the music business. For him to sing a song was to sell asong. His G clef was a dollar sign.
Albert Goldman
#43. To me, country music is like the blues, but it's something very hip and - I don't want to say commercial - but it's very worldly and good listening.
Etta James
#44. When 'Nevermind' came out, my roommate had the CD. At first, I actually thought, 'This is too polished and commercial.' It was a little off-putting. But then I was like, 'This is the best music ever.' It felt so close to what I wanted to do.
Rivers Cuomo
#45. It bothers me when I hear it in a car commercial or some such. But for the most part, it's better than seeing sacred music relegated to the scrap heap.
Richard Morris
#46. Mainstream media would convince you that there's commercial culture and that's all - but this other music is still here.
Michelle Shocked
#47. Music can save people, but it can't in the commercial way it's being used. It's just too much. It's pollution.
Bob Dylan
#48. And for the past 10 years I've been in a real commercial setting where people are all about numbers, they're all about that bottom line. So it's nice to step out of that and hang out with a bunch of people who play music just because they love it, as you can imagine.
Lee Ann Womack
#49. There are people that bring artists to me to look at it and it's a question of whether I like their music and their look and if I think there's something they have that makes them different and commercial.
Kenneth Edmonds
#50. That was a time when I did love music, I couldn't get enough of what was going on. Maybe it was Nirvana that brought me back. I guess it was a comfort because something that sounded so right - and non-commercial - had become so influential, so immediately.
Marc Jacobs
#51. An artist in 2014 who is thinking about album sales is either sadly deluded or has to make so many commercial compromises that it sort of takes the joy out of making music.
Moby
#52. The only thing that exists to me is commercial pop music.
Barry Gibb
#53. I had always loved cartoons, especially 'Bugs Bunny,' and I found I enjoyed making animated films. Even a 30-second commercial involved drawing and painting, storytelling, not to mention actors, music, and sound effects.
Mordicai Gerstein
#54. Whatever you do has to be commercial and it can't be too distracting - it has to be background music, basically.
Beck
#55. We're not uncomfortable with it, and we've already been through enough of the music business where I'm not really worried that commercial success is going to in some way - we're already past saving, you know what I mean? It's too late for us.
Jerry Garcia
#56. It's not my concern to make a commercial pop record. I want to make a record of music that I would listen to, that is lyrically rich and has songs that people can relate to - more along the Jakob Dylan route: people who create for the art of it and not necessarily the monetary rewards of it.
Crystal Bowersox
#57. I'm singing the music publisher's theme song - it ain't a commercial.
Hoagy Carmichael
#58. When hip-hop was born she had no commercial home, and was an invention of beautiful creativity. Born from a beautiful struggle, today she is mostly a 'ratchet' bitch spitting nonsense from her pimp's mansion.
T.F. Hodge
#59. In rap music, even though the element of poetry is very strong, so is the element of the drum, the implication of the dance. Without the beat, its commercial value would certainly be more tenuous.
Archie Shepp
#60. The sort of commercial parameters of classical music changed after the [World War II] , and the whole industry became more backward-looking.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
#61. I really do listen to all types of music, not only rock, but everything from good pop music - which is usually older pop music - to R&B and indie rock. I love indie rock more than a lot of the commercial stuff that you'd expect.
Amy Lee
#62. When I started making music, I made music in a very commercial space and I didn't have room to really explore things on my own terms. It took me awhile to create a little bubble where I could explore other things, and new things. When I did that, my tools were songwriting and arranging.
Robyn
#63. It's fair to say that white America wouldn't have elected an African-American president without the integrating effect of black music - from Louis Armstrong to hip-hop - and black drama and fiction, commercial as much as 'serious.'
Joe Haldeman
#64. I don't think that three minutes of music on a commercial record is going to bring paradise, but I feel like there is power in music and power in our words and power in what we put out into the world.
Kyp Malone
#65. I didn't want to be told what to do. I don't want to water down my music to fit into their formats. I know what rock and roll is to me, but everything's turning into one big commercial.
Chris Robinson
#66. You can't steal an artist's songs and also tell him he can't license that music to a commercial.
Jack White
#67. I'm very hands on with my music - I do all the artwork and everything myself - and the songs I write aren't necessarily the most commercial.
Courtney Barnett
#68. I want to burn as a beacon of possibility. I don't want nobody to misconstrue the commercial success I've had as anything other than an example of what black music is capable of. And what it's capable of is being more than just black. I'm not black or white anymore. I'm Cee Lo Green.
CeeLo Green
#69. I wasn't really writing with anything commercial in mind I just wanted to create some new music.
Billy Sherwood
#70. [Commercial] radio is absolutely the enemy of music. They are my sworn and mortal enemy, and I will have nothing to do with them.
Elvis Costello
#71. Black music has become a commercial commodity. Live performances are not so accessible as they were previously. It use to be possible to go to the bar on the corner and hear music. It was available for a fifteen cent beer.
Archie Shepp
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