To go on the road and listen to people sing a cappella - thousands of them - I couldn't do that.
— Jimmy Iovine
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.
The record industry needs a company like HTC to bring music to the phone.
I like 'The Voice.'
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.
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.
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.
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?
There was a time when, for anybody between the ages of 15 and 25, music was one, two and three.
Seeing young people caring about sound again and realizing that it's not cool to not have good sound, that means a lot.
I really think that education is ground zero for fixing anything.
When you're making music, you don't look at what's going on in the studio next to you.
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?'
I feel the pressure of getting something right.
When I was a label head, I didn't think I was greedy. I've always run my own race.
I always knew that women, some women, at times find it very difficult to find music.
Curation is everything.
It's one thing for the industry to lose half its revenue to piracy; it's another to destroy it emotionally.
You're only as good as your weakest link in the ecosystem of sound, of audio.
I enjoy Tupac's music. I enjoy Tupac.
Diversifying, to me, is the product of having an idea and knowing to say, 'Let's do it.'
I never say someone is powerful.
You have gigantic companies feeding off musicians and artists because the artists need the exposure.
I said if a woman sings an aggressive guy's lyric, it can't miss.
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.
The next Prince might just get really good at something else.
I couldn't make a headphone look like a piece of medical equipment or a toy, as most headphones do.
Those athletes are not going to wear my headphones because I asked them.
If I were going to teach a course, it would be called Don't Breathe Your Own Exhaust.
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.
Having a hit is nice, having some success, but when you move popular culture, that's a high.
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.
The fact is that 'free' in music streaming is so technically good and ubiquitous that it's stunting the growth of paid streaming.
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.'
You can't just stick someone's name on a headphone that doesn't know anything about sound.
'Magic' is a word that's too often misused in the record industry.
Tupac was a glorious person, and he had all the right intentions.
I know what labels and artists need, along with the consumer.
I've always known in my heart that Beats belonged with Apple.
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.
I just kept making social mistakes in my career.
It's hard to say if something is worth the wait, because how the hell do any of us know?
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.
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.
I'm not going to be the guy who sold the last CD.
When we did Beats, we had to begin again. Nobody at Best Buy knew who we were.
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.
To get people to pay for something that you built, it has to be of service. It has to make somebody's life better.
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.
When there's something I need to focus on, I'm like a dog with a bone.
