Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott says young bands don’t have the "infrastructure" in place to sell millions of records.
The 58-year-old rocker has sold over 100 million albums worldwide during the legendary Sheffield rock band’s career spanning four decades, but he says the music industry is in a sorry state with emerging talent unable to make big bucks unless they are pop megastars like Adele or Taylor Swift.
The ‘Pour Some Sugar On Me’ hitmaker thinks MTV having more of a focus on reality TV than music videos is partly to blame.
He told the Daily Star newspaper: "The only people selling records the way we used to are Adele and Taylor Swift.
"But the infrastructure isn’t laid out for them like it was for us. MTV was primed and ready to be picked like an apple in an orchard in the 80s – now it’s a reality TV channel."
Joe previously said that musicians nowadays spend too much time on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, time which they could spend honing their songs, and he is "glad" the medium wasn’t around when the hard rock band started out in 1977.
He said: "I’m glad it wasn’t around when we started, purely because it gave us more opportunity to concentrate on what we really wanted to be. It wasn’t, like, ‘We can’t rehearse today because we’ve got to answer all these questions.’ I think that actually is one of the reasons there aren’t so many bands coming through the way that we did – they have other tasks they have to perform that we didn’t."
The singer doesn’t think he’d have been "as good" a singer if he’d spent his time at the start of his career responding to tweets rather than rehearsing with his bandmates.
He continued: "We learned to play our instruments, we learned to sing, we learned to write songs together, and that was our only focus. Once we got that down, and then if other stuff comes in, you can probably split your time and manage to do both.
"For me, I’m not sure I would have been as good if I was starting off the way it is now. It would have been too much of an interference."
Joe Elliott: The infrastructure isn’t there for new acts to succeed
