Creativity Quote by David Crosby

Crosby is doing something sly here: he frames the past as an era of abundance and amateur devotion, then lets the nostalgia indict the present without naming a villain outright. The parenthetical - "and there were many of them, and this was a good thing" - is doing heavy lifting. It signals competition, yes, but also a kind of cultural ecology: lots of labels meant lots of weird bets, niche audiences, and executives who could lose money on a hunch because their identity was fused to the music, not the quarterly report.

Dropping Ahmet Ertegun isn’t just name-checking a legend; it’s establishing a type. Ertegun represents the collector-executive, the person who can talk about B-sides and also sign checks. Crosby’s subtext is that taste used to sit near power. In that world, commerce and obsession were entangled enough that the business could still act like patronage.

Context matters: Crosby’s career arc runs from the label-driven 60s and 70s through consolidation, private equity logic, and streaming’s playlist economy. His lament isn’t simply "labels got greedy". It’s "the job description changed". When the gatekeepers stop being fans, risk becomes liability, artists become content pipelines, and the emotional contract between musician and industry fractures. The line "They got in it because they loved music" lands as both elegy and accusation: if love was once the entry requirement, its absence explains the churn, the homogenization, and the sense that the room no longer contains anyone who’s actually listening.