Jimmy Iovine
I couldn't do a show; I have about as much talent to do television as, you know... it's not what I do. I wouldn't know where to begin.
I'm not a pioneer of hip-hop; I just saw it and said, 'This thing is incredible, and these people are incredible. They should be exposed all over the world.'
Curation is everything.
When there's something I need to focus on, I'm like a dog with a bone.
The fact is that 'free' in music streaming is so technically good and ubiquitous that it's stunting the growth of paid streaming.
I always knew that women, some women, at times find it very difficult to find music.
Girls are sitting around talking about boys, right? Or complaining about boys, when they have their heart broken or whatever, and they need music for that, right? And they need music for that. So it's hard to find the right music. Not everyone has the right list or knows a DJ.
Dre's from Compton, I'm from Brooklyn, and we both wanted to make a better life for ourselves, right? And we both - somehow, we're both recording engineers, that's how we got our break.
When I was a label head, I didn't think I was greedy. I've always run my own race.
To get people to pay for something that you built, it has to be of service. It has to make somebody's life better.
Having a hit is nice, having some success, but when you move popular culture, that's a high.
I feel the pressure of getting something right.
We're trying to make the music service a cultural point of reference, and that's why we're making video. We're making video for our Apple Music customers and our future customers.
Over four or five years, I did six albums with three people: John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, and Patti Smith. I felt that if I could care as much about their music as they did, I could be useful to them. I really cared about their music and their lives.
You have to think, 'What can I do to help my team develop, grow, and become better performers?' rather than, 'What's in it for me?'
When we did Beats, we had to begin again. Nobody at Best Buy knew who we were.
If I were going to teach a course, it would be called Don't Breathe Your Own Exhaust.
When you're making music, you don't look at what's going on in the studio next to you.
Those athletes are not going to wear my headphones because I asked them.
I really think that education is ground zero for fixing anything.
It was frustrating that young people, through no fault of their own, were listening to terrible $2 ear buds. You can't get good sound out of those.
Seeing young people caring about sound again and realizing that it's not cool to not have good sound, that means a lot.
I don't look at Spotify or Rdio or any of these guys as a direct competitor: I look at other forms of entertainment as the competitor.
The next Prince might just get really good at something else.
There was a time when, for anybody between the ages of 15 and 25, music was one, two and three.
It's hard to say if something is worth the wait, because how the hell do any of us know?
We have a problem in the industry, I believe. This whole 'free' issue. The television industry doesn't have it, the movie industry doesn't have it, but the record industry has it.
If you're an artist, and you put out a record - most artists only have one or two hit records - that has 100 million streams, on certain services you only get paid on 75% of those streams. How's an artist going to live like that?
I just kept making social mistakes in my career.
I said if a woman sings an aggressive guy's lyric, it can't miss.
What's happened to the music industry, from my perspective, is a lot of great music is behind the wall that can't get through, and therefore, a lot of artists are getting discouraged.
What I saw in the record industry is it's just getting more restricted, more restricted, more restricted to where everyone's trying to figure out what kind of song to make to get on the radio: that's researched and where advertisers are telling you what to play.
You have gigantic companies feeding off musicians and artists because the artists need the exposure.
You shouldn't take a customer who's buying an album, who's happy buying an album, and try to tell them that what they're doing is wrong.
I've always known in my heart that Beats belonged with Apple.
I never say someone is powerful.
All I ever really work for is to be a really good engineer, a good producer, a good executive, good in the world of Beats. That's power to me.
I know what labels and artists need, along with the consumer.
Diversifying, to me, is the product of having an idea and knowing to say, 'Let's do it.'
I like 'The Voice.'
I enjoy Tupac's music. I enjoy Tupac.
The record industry needs a company like HTC to bring music to the phone.
'Magic' is a word that's too often misused in the record industry.
You're only as good as your weakest link in the ecosystem of sound, of audio.
We want PC makers to have better audio because these things are used as home stereos by a lot of people, and that makes it suck.
You can't just stick someone's name on a headphone that doesn't know anything about sound.
It's one thing for the industry to lose half its revenue to piracy; it's another to destroy it emotionally.
To go on the road and listen to people sing a cappella - thousands of them - I couldn't do that.
That diploma you hold in your hands today is really just your learner's permit for the rest of the drive through life. Remember, you don't have to be smarter than the next person, all you have to do is be willing to work harder than the next person.Collection: Life