Wealth & Money Quote by Bruce Dickinson

Major labels love to cosplay as sober guardians of “the business” while behaving like drunken emperors with a corporate card. Bruce Dickinson’s line skewers that contradiction with the bluntness of someone who’s watched the machine up close: the waste happens upstairs, but the consequences get pinned on the people with guitars.

The specific intent is less anti-label posturing than a shot at the industry’s favorite moral alibi. Labels historically spent big on glossy producers, bloated marketing, radio promotion, and ill-fated attempts to manufacture hits; when the ledger turns red, the narrative flips. Suddenly the band is “difficult,” “uncommercial,” “not delivering.” Dickinson exposes the trick: risk is sold as investment when it’s glamorous, then reframed as artist failure when it’s embarrassing.

The subtext is about power, not accounting. Labels control budgets, timelines, and expectations, then use those same levers to justify ownership and punishment: recoupment clauses, dropped contracts, frozen releases, creative pressure. “Blame it on the band” names the scapegoat function of artists in a system designed to protect executives from accountability while keeping musicians hungry, pliable, and grateful for crumbs.

Context matters: Dickinson comes from a generation that saw rock become corporate infrastructure, and later watched the industry panic through the CD crash and digital disruption. In that era, “we overspent” was never a brand-friendly confession. Pointing at the band was. The line lands because it turns a private grievance into a simple public diagnosis: the label’s chaos isn’t an accident; it’s a business model with a human shield.