Science & Tech Quote by Jack Bruce

There is a musician’s shrug baked into Jack Bruce’s rambling sentence: not a manifesto, but a street-level diagnosis of how culture gets handled once it’s routed through corporate machinery. He’s talking about “the internet thing” the way artists often do when they’ve watched an industry panic in real time - not because music stopped mattering, but because the old tollbooths stopped working. The repetition of “big” is the tell. These companies aren’t just large; their size becomes their worldview. They “need big sales,” so anything that doesn’t promise scale isn’t merely unprofitable, it’s invisible.

The subtext is less “the internet ruined music” than “the business model was brittle.” Bruce points to a cycle: early digital shock, a dip, then a partial rebound (“sales have gone up again in this country a bit”). Yet even when the numbers recover, the incentive structure doesn’t. The majors aren’t “really interested” because their version of interest is preloaded: mass returns, predictable hits, low-risk marketing. That’s why the sentence trails off. He’s describing a system that can’t easily care about the mid-sized, the weird, the slow-burn - the very zones where musicians like Bruce built lasting influence.

The context is a veteran artist watching the late-90s/2000s churn: Napster-era disruption, CD collapse, consolidation, then a hesitant digital monetization. Bruce’s casual phrasing doubles as critique: the panic wasn’t about art’s survival, it was about who gets to collect rent from it.