Joe Bonamassa thinks calling musicians just ‘traveling t-shirt salespeople’ is a bit too harsh, even if he admits that touring costs have really gone up.
In a new interview with Blues Rock Review, the guitarist addressed the Exodus bassist Jack Gibson’s comments on the matter.
“The thing is, I hear from touring artists that, like anything else, the cost of doing business is up,” he started explaining. “Gasoline, hotels, lodging, meals, and all of the trappings of the road that you have to pay are more expensive now. The margins are less. I read an article [where] somebody said, ‘I’m not a musician, I’m a t-shirt salesman.’ And I was like, ‘That’s a pretty cynical way to look at it.’”
The bassist used the ‘t-shirt salesman’ term in an interview while he was talking about the death of the music business. “There’s no business. Once they started giving the music away, there’s no business,” he said during a chat with Danielle Bloom. “We don’t sell sh*t 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. I’m literally a traveling tchotchke seller. That’s what we do. We play music to try to get people to the store and sell them our f*ckin’ stuff with stuff printed on it. That’s the business.”
However, it seems like Bonamassa agrees with Gibson in a different way — that musicians still have bills to pay. “The cost of making records hasn’t changed. The studios are still $2,000 a day. Musicians still — last time I checked — needed to pay their bills, and they’re only going up,” the rocker said.
In a month, Bonamassa is starting his U.S. fall tour. The rocker will perform his first show on the tour on October 26 in Henderson, Nevada. He will finish the tour on March 19 in Melbourne, Florida before moving onto his Europe tour.