Art & Creativity Quote by Hilary Rosen

A blunt admission slips out here: the music business didn’t get “disrupted” by the internet so much as it had been rehearsing self-devaluation for decades. Rosen frames the industry not as an art economy but as a promotion engine, where the product (music) is routinely treated as marketing collateral. That phrasing is doing strategic work. “Built on promotion” recasts a moral argument about piracy and ownership into a cold operational truth: labels have long traded short-term exposure for long-term demand, and everyone in the chain learned to call that normal.

The kicker is the time stamp: “for 30 years.” Rosen is implicitly targeting the industry’s selective outrage. If radio got music “for free” as part of a symbiotic arrangement - airplay for audience-building, audience-building for sales - then the claim that free access is inherently illegitimate starts to look less like principle and more like a business model losing leverage. She’s also nodding to payola’s shadow without naming it: radio’s gatekeeping power has historically extracted value, whether through explicit payments, promotional budgets, or the softer currency of access.

Contextually, Rosen is speaking from inside the machinery, not outside it. The line reads like a corrective to nostalgia for a supposedly pure era of paid consumption. It’s not absolving digital theft; it’s puncturing the fantasy that the pre-streaming industry was a simple marketplace. The subtext: if your system trained listeners to experience music as free, don’t be shocked when they take you at your word.