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.
Those athletes are not going to wear my headphones because I asked them.
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.
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.
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.
