Def Leppard ready to ‘Let It Go’ to streaming
Def Leppard has finally given Spotify and other digital music platforms the OK to Pour Some Sugar on listeners: The British hard-rock act’s entire catalog will be available to stream Friday. What took them so long? For one, streaming hadn’t yet been invented when they signed their last record deal, and two, they weren’t hurting for money.
Thanks to non-stop touring and steady sales of their back catalog, singer Joe Elliott says, “we were doing OK and we weren’t really missing anything.”
Plus, Elliott, 58, and his bandmates wanted to wait out “the digital streaming thing” a little and get a better sense of whether the business model was here to stay or just a fad. (He notes that Def Leppard were also iTunes holdouts who didn’t put any tracks online until 2011’s Mirror Ball.)
“We just had to get our heads around it,” he says, citing the “same suspicion anyone has about anything new. The promise of what it can be and what it is is sometimes massively different.”
But after the band came off the road in June 2017, they decided the time was finally right.
“Given a bit of time to sit down and think about it and read and do the research and listen to the right people, things just fell into place,” Elliott says.
And with the band set to coheadline a nearly 70-date tour with Journey this summer, “the timing’s just perfect.”
“Plus, it’s just more of an event when you do the whole (catalog) in one gulp, and that’s something that we were extremely keen to do,” he says. “We didn’t want it coming out in dribs and drabs.”
When might fans see a follow-up to 2015’s Def Leppard?
“I don’t know what we’ll do, because we don’t make records every year,” he says. “We don’t make records every three years. We’ll make a record when we feel like it.”
And the band, which now releases its music on its own Bludgeon Riffola label, no longer has album deadlines or sales expectations to meet.
“Are we chart bombers any more?” Elliott asks. “Probably not, but we’ve joined a fantastic, elitist group of fellow non-chart bombers like McCartney and Billy Joel and the Rolling Stones. We don’t have hits anymore, but we’re still selling stadiums out everywhere.”