Like a lot of veteran artists, Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry has seen his band's album sales drop over the past decade -- and he doesn't think the music's to blame.

"The record companies don't really invest in the artist the way they used to," Perry said during an interview with Yahoo! Music. "In the '70s, you usually had fans that were just sitting and waiting for the next record to come out -- and if they didn't like it, they bought it anyway! But that's kind of the way our whole economy is now. It's built on growth instead of quality. It's built on 'out with the old, in with the new -- buy the new car because last year's car isn't cool,' rather than build a really good car that will last you as long as it should."

Perry felt that pain personally with the group's most recent studio effort, 2012's 'Music From Another Dimension!,' which he argued was "one of the best records we'd done in years and years." Looking back on the release, which sold less than a quarter of a million copies in the U.S., he added, "It was the record that the fans seemed to have been asking for. All these years, over the last 20 years, we'd get these requests, like, 'Why don't you make a record like the old ones?' I think that we got back to the real deal with the last record, but circumstances being what they were, it never got the push that it should have from the label."

Of course, bands have complained about bungled label promotion for about as long as record companies have existed, but Perry sees a paradigm shift at play -- as he put it, "I have a feeling that we're kind of at the end of an era, in a lot of different ways."

But that doesn't mean he sees Aerosmith pulling the plug on their recording efforts anytime soon. Although he'll be busy with other activity in the near future, with a solo EP planned for 2015 and his memoir due in October, he thinks the band will get around to putting together a 'Dimension!' follow-up at some point.

"I have to think we're going into the studio again, just to lay out some new songs," he mused. "I don't know how it's going to go as far as sales, but as far as us as artists, I think we're gonna have to go in."

More From Ultimate Classic Rock