Roadrunner Records has conducted a short interview with MEGADETH's Dave Mustaine about the band's new album Th1rt3en, due out this week. Here is an excerpt from the chat:

On the music industry:

"You know, records have, with the peer to peer transferring and everything, unfortunately the music business has become so changed that records don't even matter anymore. They're like business cards. I remember when I first got my first record contract, being able to pick which four songs were going to be on which side of the record. 'Never put more than four songs on there, the grooves are too close together. Can't have that much material, it'll sound terrible. Yes, that's why contracts are like that.' 'Really? Oh, wow, great.' And then the last time we went to the studio, we had a conversation where somebody had said that they wanted to have almost twice that many songs on the record, and I just laughed at how much things have changed, where a man can put almost his entire life's work into a record, and a few years later it doesn't mean anything. And you have to do 100 percent more to make it equivalent. Take for example the first VAN HALEN record. Now, they say 'we don't want these eight songs. We want 15 of these songs.' There probably would have been no Van Halen. I don't know that those guys would have had all those guitar pyrotechnics on the record, if it would have just been too much for the fans to digest. I remember listening to records like early TED NUGENT and KISS and stuff like that – you had KISS Alive, right? You had to have had KISS Alive. Maybe not, maybe you're too young. I remember listening to those live records – God dang it, if it had too many songs on it, you were like [makes snoring noise]. And now it's like, you have to have songs, and videos, and give away t-shirts, and you can win dinner at my house, and it's like, when did we try so hard? When did music get so crappy that you had to give somebody a back rub with it?"

Read the entire interview here.