Art & Creativity Quote by Steve Brown

Steve Brown’s line slices through the romantic mythology that still clings to music culture: the idea that songs float above commerce, untouched by invoices, algorithms, and rent. The phrasing matters. “Fun and all that” isn’t dismissive of art so much as a quick nod to the story fans want to hear, before he pivots to the harder truth: “first and foremost” reframes the entire enterprise, insisting that enjoyment is secondary to infrastructure. It’s a musician speaking like an operator, not a dreamer.

The subtext is a warning about who really has leverage. When Brown says “it is a business,” he’s pointing at the machinery behind the curtain: contracts, advances, publishing splits, touring economics, merch margins, gatekeepers, and now the platform economics of streaming. The bluntness is strategic. It’s a way of inoculating younger artists against the oldest trap in the industry: trading long-term ownership for short-term exposure, assuming passion will be reciprocated with fairness.

Contextually, it echoes a moment when the public-facing brand of music is intimacy and authenticity, while the back-end reality is scale and monetization. Brown is also subtly defending pragmatism as a form of survival. Treating music “first and foremost” as money isn’t cynicism; it’s a refusal to be naïve. In an era where “doing what you love” is often used to justify underpaying creatives, his sentence reads like labor consciousness in a leather jacket.