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The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band
Brian Eno
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Interpretation

What this quote means

The quote highlights the profound influence of a piece of art, suggesting that its value is not measured by sales but by its impact on creativity.

Brian Eno's quote about the first Velvet Underground album illustrates how true artistic significance often transcends commercial success. Although the album sold only a modest number of copies, its profound impact inspired a generation of musicians to create their own music, demonstrating that influential art can shape culture and create movements, regardless of its initial popularity.

Themes

Velvet UndergroundMusicInfluenceArtCreativity

In practice

Example use cases

During a panel discussion on music innovation, one might say this quote to emphasize the power of influential albums.

More from Brian Eno

We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.
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I think that technology is always invented for historical reasons, to solve a historical problem. But they very soon reveal themselves to be capable of doing things that aren't historical that nobody had ever thought of doing before.
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When I first started making ambient music, I was setting up systems using synthesizers that generated pulses more or less randomly. The end result is a kind of music that continuously changes. Of course, until computers came along, all I could actually present of that work was a piece of its output.
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People do dismiss ambient music, don't they? They call it 'easy listening,' as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to.
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In the future, you won't buy artists' works; you'll buy software that makes original pieces of 'their' works, or that recreates their way of looking at things. You could buy a Shostakovich box, or you could buy a Brahms box. You might want some Shostakovich slow-movement-like music to be generated. So then you use that box.
Brian EnoRead
Ambient music must be as ignorable as it is interesting.
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