In a new interview with Mexico’s ATMósferas Magazine, IRON MAIDEN singer Bruce Dickinson discussed the changes in the music industry over the last four decades. He said: “The music industry has done two things. On the one hand, if you’re an artist, it’s contracted, as in it’s shrunk in terms of the amount of money you get paid for your art — unless you are some massive social media thing, or whatever it is, or unless you’re a DJ who turns up with a memory stick and gets paid five times what a band gets paid. And they have to split it eight ways, and he just turns up with his memory stick and pretends he’s doing something, and goes away with a huge amount of money. So the world has gone on its ass from that perspective. And there’s not a lot that any one individual can do about that. You just have to work with the way the world is.”
He continued: “I have no desire whatsoever to be a DJ. I’m a singer, I’m a musician, I have bands and people like that, and they all have to make a living playing with me. So I do the best I can to make sure that everybody’s happy, everybody’s making a living and we can go out and play great music.
“In terms of the way that records are sold — well, records, downloads, things like that — I think it’s a lose-lose situation for everybody,” Dickinson added. “I mean, you have all the things like Spotify and stuff like that who are basically ripping off musicians by paying them next to nothing for playing their work. And still, [Spotify] can’t make money. So they’re not making money [and] the musicians aren’t getting paid. New bands can hardly afford to start up, but they do. Why? Because they love what they do. It’s that that drives them. It’s that that motivates them. So, if the streaming services could manage to actually pay people properly for when people listen, which probably means that people listening have to pay more, which I frankly don’t object to, and I don’t think probably most listeners would. Maybe fewer people would listen, but it would be people who care, not people who just do it because it’s cheap.”
Asked if he thinks the skyrocketing concert ticket prices are having a negative impact on the music industry, Bruce said: “Well, two things. One, it depends what the show is and kind of who the audience is. I mean,
