“Had the industry not been decimated by a lack of vision caused by corporate bean counters obsessed with the bottom line, musicians would have been able to stick with creating music rather than trying to market it as well. “

“Reagan’s much-vaunted trickle-down theory said that wealth trickled down to the masses from the elite at the top. Now we’ve found out that this is patently untrue- the current economic collapse reflects this self-serving folly. The same holds for music. It doesn’t trickle down; it percolates up from the artists, from word of mouth, from the streets and rises up to the general populace. Constrained by the workings of SoundScan/BDS (Nielsen monitoring systems), music now came from the top and was rammed down people’s throats.”

John Mellencamp (via Huffpost)