Creativity Quote by Todd Rundgren

Rundgren is talking like a working musician watching technology quietly rewrite the culture’s attention span in real time. “Bandwidth” isn’t just a nerdy constraint from the early internet era; it’s a metaphor for scarcity, patience, and the friction that used to force listeners to live with an album. When you had to buy a CD, you often absorbed the deep cuts along with the hits, and artists could justify weird sequencing, long intros, mood swings, and conceptual sprawl. Download culture, he suggests, didn’t merely make music portable - it made it divisible.

The sharp subtext is that “choice” isn’t always artistic liberation. Cherry-picking sounds democratic, but it also collapses the album into a menu, where the listener becomes a curator and the artist gets flattened into a handful of clickable moments. Rundgren’s phrase “brought back” is doing work: it frames the digital shift not as a brave new world, but as a return to an older radio-era logic where singles were king and albums were, for many people, just packaging.

There’s also a quiet jab at gatekeeping and feedback loops. If audiences gravitate to a few tracks because they’re easiest to acquire, those tracks become the ones that get played, promoted, and remembered - “the impetus” behind radio decisions that are supposedly about taste but are really about measurable behavior. Rundgren isn’t romanticizing the past; he’s pointing out how quickly a technical limitation can become an aesthetic regime, training everyone to mistake convenience for preference.