Neil Young has been making music for nearly 50 years, so we have to assume that he’s an expert at the topic.

Speaking at D: Dive into Media, Young discusses the state of the digital music business.

While the singer is concerned about the fact that many people share low quality MP3’s, he’s not falling for the argument that piracy is killing music.

“It doesn’t affect me because I look at the internet as the new radio. I look at the radio as gone. […] Piracy is the new radio. That’s how music gets around. […] That’s the radio. If you really want to hear it, let’s make it available, let them hear it, let them hear the 95 percent of it.”

The comparison to the radio is interesting as that has been one of the biggest promotional tools of the music industry in recent history.

But it wasn’t that loved at the beginning of last century.

In the 1920s the music industry blamed broadcast radio for their woes, as revenue dropped during the great depression.

Times haven’t changed much.