Oh dear. Exodus man Jack Gibson is feeling a bit gloomy.
"It isn't that I'm just jaded, it's that there's no music business any more"
Jack Gibson
The bassist, who has spent nearly three decades in the Californian thrash metallers, was interviewed on the Danielle Bloom podcast this week and when asked what advice he’d give to young musicians, shrugged his shoulders and said: "I don't know what to tell young musicians today because I am jaded. And it isn't that I'm just jaded, it's that there's no music business any more.”
"When I was young, there was a path, there were steps to take," he explained. "You got your band together, you put your music together, you started looking for shows, and if you could draw people to your shows, then the next step was that label people would be interested.
There's no business. Once they started giving the music away, there's no business
Jack Gibson
"Then you had to get your promotional pack together to give to the labels that were interested. And then you tried to get signed and then you tried to make records and sell records And those steps don't exist at all any more.”
“Now the step is make a band, or not even make a band. Let's just go viral. I don't know how to do that. Don't ask me how to f**king do that. I'm in my fifties. I don't know how to do that shit. It's totally a mystery to me,” he said, sounding utterly baffled.
When Bloom pointed out that things have changed and that it isn’t like the 1960s or '70s any more, Gibson answered: “There's no business. Once they started giving the music away, there's no business. We don't sell shit for records. If we don't go out and sell T-shirts, we don't make money. I'm a T-shirt salesman. I'm not a musician.”
Warming to his theme, he warned: “And any day now, we're all gonna lose our jobs to these f**kin' robots. Once the AI figures out how to actually make music that people enjoy, they're not gonna pay us to do shit."
Bloom tried to brighten things up by pointing out that human-made live music will always be in demand, but Gibson’s gloom couldn’t be lifted. "Well, that's true. But at this point in time, most of the music business isn't that; most of it is licensing and commercial jingles and music editing. All that's gonna just disappear.
"Like, who's gonna pay somebody to write music for a movie? When one guy can just go [punch a few commands into a computer] and it comes out. And we're not gonna know the fucking difference.”
So...brutally honest assessment of an industry in terminal decline? Or an old man unable to cope with the 21st Century?
Exodus will be touring North America in the autumn and, yes, there will be T-shirts on sale.
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