ANTHRAX Guitarist: 'This New Generation Of Kids Just Doesn't Seem To Respect Music'

Don de Leaumont of The Great Southern Brainfart recently conducted an interview with ANTHRAX guitarist Rob Caggiano. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

The Great Southern Brainfart: You've expressed in the past that there needs to be a serious change in how the industry is doing things. In your opinion, what needs to change to make things better again?

Rob: Well, it's hard to say. This new generation of kids just doesn't seem to respect music. They don't respect it as an artform like they did years ago. To these young kids, they don't understand the concept that this is our lives. This is our career and it costs a lot of money to make a good record. When you go on the computer and hit a fucking button and download something for free, you're stealing, but the kids don't realize that. Somehow that needs to change and I think it will. I think musicians need to take the power back at some point soon because it's just getting worse and worse. This is how we make our living and pretty soon bands won't be able to survive and then what? [laughs]

The Great Southern Brainfart: Do you think that bands have started to take that power back by not going with major labels and starting their own record labels and handling distribution and what not?

Rob: Yeah. I just think that everything is going to be different at some point soon. I don't even know what "major labels" are anymore. [laughs]

The Great Southern Brainfart: Oh yeah. That's because so many major labels are gone and independent labels are now the new major labels with different names and so on. It's confusing.

Rob: [laughs] Major labels these days have like 10 people working for them [laughs]. It's just a huge mess. There just needs to be a way for them to figure out how to make sure the musicians are getting paid properly and this whole Internet piracy thing needs to be controlled.

The Great Southern Brainfart: We've talked about how you feel about the piracy aspect, but how about buying music online? How do you feel about that? It's like the magic of going to a record store is long gone so this is the only alternative it seems.

Rob: There are barely even any record stores left anymore. In New York City, there's Bleecker Bob's and Generation Records. Those are the only two record stores I know of and they're around the corner from each other, so that's convenient. [laughs] Other than that, I don't even know where to go. I mean, Walmart carries music, but they don't carry the music I want. Best Buy. Same shit. It's all online. These days I buy most of my shit on iTunes.

The Great Southern Brainfart: How do you feel that this seems to be the best way to get music these days?

Rob: My only problem with downloading music from iTunes is that the music doesn't sound good. The files are not full bandwidth. That, to me, is just weird. It's like we go through all of this trouble to make an album sound really awesome, and then it goes on iTunes and it gets compressed and then it's playing on someone's broken iPod and shit, so what's the point. [laughs] Honestly, I have no problem with iTunes, but I do miss going to record stores and picking up the CDs, feeling it in my hands, and seeing the artwork.

Read the entire interview from The Great Southern Brainfart.