Top 110 Quotes & Sayings by Troy Carter

My biggest frustration is the lack of scale in the music industry. The fact that no one has sold 100 million copies of an album is frustrating.

You can't make an artist like Lady Gaga. You can help support, you can help develop the vision - I think you can add to the vision - but you just can't make an artist like that. That's like saying Lebron James' high school coach made Lebron James.

Money doesn't make me tick. This definition of success doesn't make me tick. Managing some of the biggest stars in the world doesn't make me tick. Making my family proud makes me tick.

I was Jazzy Jeff's assistant.

If you wake up in the morning and your favorite artist isn't on the service that you're paying ten dollars a month for, sooner or later you lose faith in the subscription model.

I had this little rap group, and we were called '2 Too Many'... We used to hang out in front of Jazzy Jeff's record studio every day.

That's all I ever wanted to do in my life was music. And because I was a failed artist, I was actually able to help somebody accomplish their dream was, you know, definitely fulfilling.

Exclusives are bad for artists, bad for consumers, and bad for the whole industry.

It's pre-roll or post-roll on Vevo. The record company makes money off of that, and then it trickles down.

GaGa is a digital baby - that's how they communicate. There cant be any layers between the artists and their fans.

With what Enrou was doing with helping women and taking products from local marketplaces, we thought it was really great.

I'm a very commonsense guy - I just look at the viability of the idea, if I feel the team has the ability to execute the idea. I also look at the investment syndicate, the size of the market, and then a lot of gut married on top of it.

I said, 'Who said African American founders can't build a billion dollar company?'

I don't think we're out there aggressively looking for deals. Our strategy is that business follows the creative. We're not out there scouring the marketplace for opportunities.

Now we know that if we make a ten min video for YouTube, people will watch it.

I think overall, and this isn't specific to Spotify or any streaming service or any label... when you consider the overall value chain of the music industry and how important the songwriter is to the business - I think there needs to be another look at the value chain.

To me, as A&R people and as managers, we're in the business of finding talent. It's no different than working with these engineers who just want to make good products.

What I like about Bre.ad is the simplicity of it. When you can explain it to people, like 'five-second billboards in front of a link shortener,' it makes a lot of sense.

On the artist side, we made a significant investment in very young artists from the very beginning of their careers and helped them become global superstars.

When you look at how technology companies are funded, it's not a zero-sum game. It could be 20 investors in one company, and everybody has to work together for the benefit of that company.

If a kid goes and buys a CD at Best Buy, we have no idea who the person is, how many times they listen to it, or anything like that.

The music industry really is a meritocracy on a creative level.

I invested in Uber in 2011 when it was only in San Francisco.

People don't buy horses to ride around any more for transportation. I just think the world changes. As a business, we have to make the proper adjustments.

Hustle is simple - it's doing the work. A lot of people like to talk about it, a lot of people have ideas, but it's difficult to actually do the work.

I was brought onboard to strengthen the bridge between Spotify and the music community.

No one has bridged that gap between music and technology yet.

My third hire when I came to Spotify was Tiffany Kumar, who came on as our global head of songwriter relations. The whole idea was to put our heads together and figure out how to build and contribute within the songwriting community.

Music is one of those businesses in which, if you're talented and hustle hard enough, you can make it - specifically as an entrepreneur. If you look as far back as Berry Gordy, Russell Simmons, Andre Harrell, L.A. Reid, and Sean 'Diddy' Combs, there's a whole lineage of successful black entrepreneurs who have built their own companies from scratch.

I found a scrap book that my mom had given to me, and inside was a letter that I wrote to myself at age 19. The letter included my goals and dreams for my life, and even then, I was writing about the management company that I built today.

I think, as an industry, we should be supportive of a broad subscription model and not do anything to jeopardize the potential health of the music business - because we're not out of the woods yet.

Music as a whole industry is growing exponentially, but in terms of the actual music file, when you look at the actual value there, to me, 'The Beatles' catalog should be worth more than Spotify.

The more people are listening to music and experiencing it, the more value for both the music companies and the artist, especially when their financial model is built around that . With the music industry, everybody is starting to understand that doesn't begin with a piece of music.

People are experimenting with streaming, with subscription services, whether it's a Spotify or a Pandora or a Rdio.

When I first got pitched on Uber, I thought it was the dumbest idea ever.

With Gaga - she's not afraid to take chances. You get these dynamic projects because of it. She's completely unafraid.

When you sit down with Zynga and Google, and they talk about billions of impressions, you think, music has way more of an emotional connection than technology, but we haven't cracked the code.

You go into the venues, and there's a huge drop-off rate in the merch lines. People don't want to miss parts of the concert.

There are not a lot of black men in the pop business.

The problem with when you look at eBay is that you can put a pair of Jordans next to a frying pan. It's an altogether different experience compared to having some editorial around it and well-curated experience.

With the 'Born This Way' album, generally we said, how do we find strategic partners that can help us with our vision? Part of that is about putting the music in places people wouldn't normally put music, like with Google and with Gilt.

I'd like to open doors for underserved communities and minorities in entrepreneurship.

When we're looking at strategic partners, it may be that they're larger partners or big corporations or start-ups. But, when you look at Gilt and places like Amazon and Starbucks, they're all places where it's a lot of foot traffic or digital traffic.

I bring in the record label who distributes the music.

Technology is going to play a huge part in tomorrow's music business. And the companies that will win are going to be the most equipped to understand how to use data to further an artist's career.

Coming from the music business and seeing the transition from artists to fans, fans to consumers, it's really about understanding the psychology of why people want to associate with your brand.

I think piracy itself is going to end up going away.

The music industry really has to learn a lesson from the tech industry about what scale means at the end of the day and learning how to monetize.

My mom was not able to buy us the expensive Air Jordans, so if I wanted something that was a little bit nicer, my brother and I, we had to go earn money for it.

There's less clutter in the beverage category than in the music category. A lot less clutter.

Once we started making investments, we realized the same service we provided to artists was applicable to entrepreneurs as well.

When you think about brands and movie studios and everybody who is trying to reach millennials, having a captive audience in the back of Lyft or an Uber is a pretty great place.

The way it works is the manager's sort of, you know, is like the hub of an artist's career.

The way consumers interact with music is different now. It's not an albums business anymore; it's a singles business again, and the industry has gone through that before.

I was just a kid in love with hip hop music. I love music. I love the culture. I wanted to be a part of it in any way.

A lot of corporations now have venture arms that are investing in young entrepreneurs or building programs within so you can disrupt yourself internally instead of looking to those external factors.

There were a lot of stereotypes that I had to break of how people in the entertainment industry do business.

Lady Gaga is phenomenal. From the first day I met her, she was lightning in a bottle.

I thought I was going to be a rapper as a kid and used to hop the train down to Jazzy Jeff's studio for, like, six months straight waiting outside of the studio for the big break, and one day we got in the studio and played our demo for Will and Jeff and quickly learned that we weren't that good.

I came up with Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. Those guys, they took me under their wing at an early age.