Mellencamp: 'The Internet Is Dangerous'

The veteran rocker is adamant the rise in online music sales and the decline of CDs, combined with a sharp increase in internet piracy, will be detrimental to the industry in the long term, and he's even convinced digital tracks don't sound the same as hard copies.

He tells Reuters, "I think the internet is the most dangerous thing invented since the atomic bomb. It's destroyed the music business. It's going to destroy the movie business.

"(I listened to a Beatles track on a CD and then on an iPod, and) you could barely even recognise it as the same song. You could tell it was those guys singing, but the warmth and quality of what the artist intended for us to hear was so vastly different."

Mellencamp also fears the internet will spell the end of rock 'n' roll, insisting only a few popular artists will be remembered in years to come.

He adds, "After a few generations, it's gone. Rock 'n' roll - as important as we think it is, and as big as it was, and as much money as people made on it, and as proud as I am to say that I was part of it - at the end of the day, they're gonna say: 'Yeah, there was this band called the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones, and this guy named Bob Dylan...'

"And the rest of us? We're just gonna be footnotes. And I think that that's OK. I'm happy to have spent my life doing what I wanted to do, playing music, make something out of life, but forgetting about the idea of legacy."