Creativity Quote by Judy Collins

Collins cuts through the romantic myth that great songs naturally rise to the top. Her line is a quiet rebuke to the fairy tale of “discovery,” where talent gets “found” because it deserves to be. Music, she argues, is not scarce; access is. The world is saturated with melody, craft, and feeling at every moment. What’s scarce is the channel: the machine that decides what counts as audible.

The phrasing matters. “Always occurring” makes music feel like weather or gravity: constant, indifferent to whether the industry notices. That shifts credit away from gatekeepers and away from audiences, too. If a song doesn’t break through, it’s tempting to blame taste, laziness, or the artist’s lack of grit. Collins points instead to “marketing, attention, and many other factors” - a deliberately broad pile-up that suggests the real determinants are messy and often unromantic: radio programming, playlist placement, touring economics, label budgets, press cycles, platform algorithms, even what kind of story can be sold about an artist.

Coming from Collins, a folk icon who lived through the transition from radio-era tastemakers to MTV to streaming, it reads as both wisdom and warning. She’s defending the unseen: the brilliant song on a small label, the songwriter without a narrative hook, the local scene that never gets mapped by national media. The subtext is almost political: culture isn’t just made by artists; it’s distributed by power. In that sense, “hearing” becomes less an act of personal choice than a managed outcome.