Creativity Quote by Roy Ayers

Ayers doesn’t romanticize the record store as a temple; he treats it like a battlefield with fluorescent lighting. The logic is blunt: shelf space is finite, foot traffic is finite, attention is finite. If your LP is staring out from the racks, someone else’s is turned sideways, buried, or never stocked at all. That’s not arrogance so much as an unvarnished admission of how cultural visibility works in the real economy of music.

The subtext is almost chilly in its honesty: art doesn’t merely compete on merit, it competes on logistics. Distribution, placement, and the tiny window of a shopper’s patience can decide who gets heard. Ayers is describing a zero-sum system where “exposure” isn’t a vibe, it’s a limited resource. He’s also implicitly pushing back on the fantasy that good music naturally floats to the top. It doesn’t. It gets stocked, promoted, reissued, bundled, algorithmically recommended, or quietly disappears.

Context matters here: Ayers came up in an era when records were physical commodities and retail bottlenecks were king. Yet the observation lands neatly in the streaming age, where the shelf is a playlist and the store traffic is an algorithm’s mood. “New ways to sell records” reads less like crass commerce than professional survival: keep moving, keep adapting, keep hacking the channels that decide whether your work gets a chance to exist in public at all.