Luke Bryan has seemingly slammed Simon Cowell for judging talent competitions without being an artist himself.

Luke Bryan

Luke Bryan

The 41-year-old country music star is set to join the judging panel on the ABC reboot of Fox talent show 'American Idol', and has seemingly lashed out at former judge and music mogul Simon Cowell - who held a position on the panel from the debut season in 2002 to ninth season in 2010 - for being a "sit behind the desk" kind of person, rather than an actual performer.

When asked which of the new judges he thought would fill the "tough judge" role that Simon notoriously held, Luke said: "Well, Lionel put it best. We are all artists. We're not some sit behind the desk record label guy."

To which fellow judge Katy Perry added: "That literally doesn't have a job here anymore. Bye."

The 'Kick the Dust Up' singer then continued to say that the new panel - completed by Lionel Richie - features three musicians who "know what it's like" to be staring out their careers like the hopefuls on the show.

He said: "We're artists so we know what it's like to be in that scenario where we're laying our ... we're pouring our heart out on the line. And you know, we revert back to how people handled us in our path to get here. So, I think we ran long on our first day because we were really, really careful."

To which Katy agreed and added: "We were sensitive to people's dreams. Like, these are people's little dream."

'Hello' hitmaker Lionel also agrees that the trio will be taking a kinder approach, and says they hope to "encourage" people to go away and work on their voices if they aren't quite up to scratch in the first audition.

Speaking to 'Entertainment Tonight', he said: "Think about it for a moment. Barbra Streisand walks out on stage and you say that performance sucked. She's never gonna see you again. You have to understand we're artists. We can encourage - in other words, we won't let you go through right now but come back in two years. Do you follow me? Or, maybe singing may not be your skill. You can say it that was as opposed to saying, 'I hate it. You'll never work again in this business,' where you just killed a kid."

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