A Quote by James McMurtry

Back before Napster and Spotify, we toured to promote record sales. 
 Now we make records to promote tour dates. — © James McMurtry
Back before Napster and Spotify, we toured to promote record sales. Now we make records to promote tour dates.
Recorded music is basically free now. I used to tour to promote a CD, but now I make a CD to promote a tour. I've moved on and live with the new reality, but I do get frustrated when people do dumb things.
Back when Napster first came along, I started telling everybody Napster was like shooting yourself in the foot because you're stealing music. The record companies don't pay for us to make records - the bands do.
It used to be that you made an album and then you went on the road to promote that album, hoping for good record sales. Well, good record sales basically don't exist any more, and the emphasis has been more on the live show.
They [ Factory Records] are always looking for the next group, the next big thing, to bring the record sales in and for them to promote and everything, but Factory just sign who they want to, put records by who they want to out, package it how they want to, how they like doing it. It's just run like that.
I call it "being interrupted by success." We had done The Soft Bulletin, which came out in 1999, and we knew we that were gonna make another record before too long. But in between this, we were still in this mode of kind of just - not re-creating what we could be, but kind of doing different things. For the longest time in the Flaming Lips we were like, "Make a record, go on tour. Come back, make another record," and you know, I think, frankly, we were kind of like, "There's more to life than just recording records and going on tour."
Yes, it's a very difficult thing to do, to promote a record, do television shows, and to still want to remain private, it's really quite difficult to explain to people what you're trying to do. I mean I'd actually quite like to be a recluse, but you know, you've got to promote the record as well.
When I have to promote things now, sometimes I realize that I had a movie in mind, but in the end, it's a vision of somebody else, so I have to promote their idea.
Drugs are about dulling perception, about addiction and about behavioral repetition...What *psychedelics* are about is pattern- dissolving experiences of an extraordinarily high or different awareness. They are the exact opposite of drugs. They promote questioning , they promote consciousness, they promote value examinations, they promote the reconstruction of behavioral patterns.
I just kinda like playing. I don't necessarily go on tour to promote my albums. I'm on the road all the time. The fact that I have a new record is out is a coincidence.
We are working on organising classical music festivals in a bid to promote qawwali there and produce films that promote music. Perhaps people lack the talent as yet, but at least there's a stable platform available to promote this as an art form.
I only toured for three months. As soon as I got off [tour], I was just dying to start recording, because it was on my mind: 'I've got to make another record now.' And I was totally excited.
PROMOTE A REVOLUTIONARY FLOOD AND TIDE IN ART. Promote living art, anti-art, promote NON ART REALITY to be fully grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dilettantes and professionals.
Kids are taking music for free all the time. They have Spotify, Pandora... The record companies aren't making the kind of music that they used to make. Artists make their money on tours, not from album sales.
The Obama administration now has regulations that tells them that they can no longer promote marriage to these young girls. They can no longer promote marriage as a way of avoiding poverty and bad choices that they make in their life. They can no longer even teach abstinence education. They have to be neutral with respect to how people behave.
I've seen too many people who have been artists for a long time, on that cycle of record-promote-tour, and you look up and 10 years of your life is gone. I didn't want that to happen to me.
God's not going to promote you because you have a dream, He's going to promote you because you've maximized where you are so now you're ready to go to the next level.
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