Creativity Quote by Tom Jenkinson

For a musician, “I don’t know how many records I’m selling” lands like a shrug with a sharpened edge. Tom Jenkinson (Squarepusher) built a career in scenes where numbers are both fetish and farce: sales charts, label mythology, the nerdy prestige of scarcity, the quiet competition over who’s “really” influential. His line refuses the scoreboard without making a grand anti-capitalist speech. It’s disinterest as posture, but also disinterest as protection.

The intent feels twofold. On the surface, it’s practical: electronic artists often exist at a remove from the machinery that translates music into units, territories, and quarterly reports. Even successful acts can be insulated from those metrics, especially when the work lives in niche ecosystems of vinyl runs, DJ culture, and cult followings. Underneath, it’s a statement about where value sits. Jenkinson’s reputation is built less on mass appeal than on virtuosity and experimentation; counting records would imply the wrong audience, the wrong goal.

The subtext is a critique of the listener too. Fans and press love to turn experimental musicians into “secretly huge” stories or “unsung genius” martyrs, both narratives obsessed with validation through scale. By claiming ignorance, he declines to be cast as either. It’s a small sentence that keeps the work in front: not the market, not the mythology, not the bragging rights. Just the noise, the craft, the next track.