BRUCE DICKINSON: 'People Are Prepared To Pay More Money For A Book Than They Are For An Album'

IRON MAIDEN singer Bruce Dickinson was recently interviewed on the "Huomenta Suomi" show, which airs on Finland's MTV3. You can now watch the chat in two parts below.

Speaking about how different it is to be a musician today compared to how it was back in the 1980s, Dickinson said: "Well, for us, it's brilliant [to be a musician right now]. I think for musicians who are starting out, I think it's more difficult, because the whole way of earning money from music has really changed. I mean, it used to be that you could write a song and sort of get paid for it. Well, now, people don't see… I'm very pleased people are paying money for my book, but, actually, people are prepared to pay more money for a book than they are for an album or something else like that. And that's a weird thing, because I think people really value music, but somehow I think the guys, the kind of Internet pirates that disrupted everything, they kind of broke the link between, 'Hey, this is money' and 'Somebody spent their life making this.' People will pay stupid money for a pair of sneakers, but they won't pay one-tenth of that amount of money for the guy that made the album that sponsored the sneakers or something. It's a little bit crazy, but that's the world we live in."

Asked if he is the type of person who starts something and then sticks with it for the rest of his life, Dickinson said: "Eh… Well… No. [Laughs] I mean, at the height of [IRON MAIDEN's] success, I quit and then I came back. So change, actually, is inevitable, and sometimes you need to move it along and do something a little bit nuts. But I worked full-time as an airline pilot and I used to take my holidays and go on tour with IRON MAIDEN. How weird is that? I've done a lot of things. So I'm not scared of change. But I agree with you — you need to stick with things, because only by sticking with things through the good times, the bad times can you really find out the true nature of everything. If you give up when anything becomes hard, you'll never find out what's beyond, you'll never find out within yourself what you're capable of."

Dickinson's autobiography, "What Does This Button Do?", last month landed at No. 10 on the New York Times "Hardcover Nonfiction" best sellers list. It was released in the U.S. on October 31 via Dey Street Books (formerly It Books),an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Following the massively successful global tour of 2016-17 in support of its 16th studio album, "The Book Of Souls", IRON MAIDEN will take to the road again in 2018 with a series of arena and festival shows in Europe on the "Legacy Of The Beast" world tour, opening in Tallinn, Estonia on May 26 and finishing at the O2 Arena, London on August 10.