Def Leppard waited to put their entire back catalogue on streaming services because they "weren’t going to be victims of the industry".
The ‘Pour Some Sugar On Me’ rockers, fronted by Joe Elliott, recently put their music on Spotify and Apple Music for the first time but admitted that part of the reason they waited was because they were holding out for a "fair deal".
Joe told Rolling Stone magazine: "We needed the right deal for the band. We weren’t going to be victims of the industry. We signed our deal with Mercury many, many decades ago when there was no digital part of the record deal. So when [our contract ended] in 2009, we were free to do whatever we wanted to do. We were so busy touring and not worrying about the back catalogue – because people were still buying CDs – that we weren’t sure about [embracing] streaming.
"We came to the conclusion that it’s not going to do us any harm, but the deal had to be right. These things just don’t happen overnight."
And he revealed that trying to place all of their music on the same service was another hold-up.
Joe said: "We didn’t want certain albums on one service and others through another one. So negotiating everything with different places just takes time, It’s not like a make-or-break thing, whether we do it or not. So we didn’t and just went off on our own.
"We were able to come to the decision that it was the right thing to do and have it all come out at once. So now you’ve got everything from the very first EP we did back in 1979 – which is what got us our record deal in the first place – all the way up to the last album that came out in 2015."
Def Leppard: We weren’t going to be victims of music industry
