Creativity Quote by Norman Granz

Granz’s line lands like a politely phrased indictment: the industry isn’t “interested in music,” it’s interested in the kind of sales. That small pivot from art to arithmetic is the whole point. By singling out “rock groups,” he’s not taking a lazy swing at a genre so much as naming a business model that had, by the rock era, become brutally legible: scale beats nuance, youth beats longevity, marketing beats musicianship.

Coming from Norman Granz, the producer and impresario who built Jazz at the Philharmonic and fought segregation on tour, the subtext is personal. Jazz, his life’s work, thrives on individuality, improvisation, and slow-burn reputations. Rock, in the postwar marketplace, was increasingly packaged for mass replication: bands you could brand, tour, photograph, and sell as an identity. Granz is pointing at how easily record labels chase the most monetizable audience, then rewrite “taste” as if it were a natural law rather than a quarterly strategy.

The sentence also contains a warning about who gets to be culturally loud. When labels prioritize “the kind of sales” rock can generate, they aren’t just moving money; they’re moving attention, radio slots, press coverage, and distribution muscle. The result is a feedback loop that makes certain sounds feel inevitable and others feel “niche,” even when the “niche” is where a lot of the musical risk and invention lives. Granz isn’t nostalgic; he’s naming the machinery that turns commerce into canon.