Creativity Quote by David Crosby

Crosby’s line lands like a weary backstage aside: the moment the money got serious, the suits took the stage. He’s not romanticizing some pure, golden-era industry so much as pointing to a specific power transfer - from people who bet on taste to people who manage risk. “Lawyers and accountants” aren’t just job titles here; they’re shorthand for a business model that prefers contracts over chemistry, and predictability over weird brilliance.

The phrasing matters. “Now” carries a generational sting, the sense of watching a culture you helped build get optimized into something unrecognizable. “Run by” implies governance, not participation: creatives didn’t just lose influence, they lost the steering wheel. And “when the takes started to get big” is Crosby doing what he often did best - making a sweeping indictment sound like a casual observation. “Takes” (a musician’s word) also slips in a subtle claim of ownership: this industry used to revolve around recording, around making something; now it revolves around extracting something.

Context is doing a lot of work. Crosby came up when labels still relied on A&R intuition and took long bets on artists who didn’t fit neat categories. By the time conglomerates, catalog value, and blockbuster economics set the rules, the incentives shifted: fewer risks, more litigation, more accounting-driven decisions about what’s “worth” releasing. His subtext is blunt: when art becomes an asset class, creativity gets treated like a liability.