T-Bone Burnett – HuffPost 9.29.10

Mike Ragogna: Do you have any advice for new artists coming into the field right now?

T-Bone Burnett: You know what I would say? This might sound counter-intuitive, but I would say–if I were a new artist, coming in right now–I wouldn’t do anything on the Internet at all. I would stay completely off the Internet and go total privateer. Just make your own records, or if you need money to make records, get a partner. Don’t worry about CDs and all that stuff. Just make whatever you want, put it on whatever form you want to, and sell it for anything you want to. That would be my advice.

MR: I love how you said “counter-intuitive” because everybody has been gravitating towards finding the latest online tool or social site in an almost frantic, panicked way.

TBB: Yeah, you can do that, but how many Facebook bands are there? How many MySpace bands are there? And where’s the story in that? There is a story if you go out and blow people’s minds. There are so many great, different mediums available to store analog data. Vinyl still sounds killer, and there’s no reason not to make vinyl records. There’s no reason to make anything but vinyl records for that matter.

MR: (laughs)

TBB: (laughs) You can give things away. MP3s are about valuable enough to give away. That’s about how good they sound, you should give them away. Compressed audio is just bad for us in every way. It’s physically bad for us, it’s emotionally bad for us, and it just sounds terrible. You’ll forgive me for saying so.

MR: A lot of people are in your camp. To be perfectly honest, there has always been the digital versus analog argument, and analog has to win in every case because how long can the mind listen to zeroes and ones without getting fatigued?

TBB: Right, and there will be new analog storage mediums coming that will be better than what we have now. Digital is great for passing information, but for music, it doesn’t work as well. Music doesn’t break down the same way words do, you know?