But that would be a mistake. Despite the presence of young female artists such as Lily Allen, Amy Winehouse and Corinne Bailey Rae, and although it has always been funded by female customers, the music industry is more sexist than ever.

We know this, not just because music magazines refuse to have the enormously talented . . . and just plain enormous . . . Beth Ditto on their covers, but because Joni Mitchell says so. Perhaps we better take a little time out here in order to explain who Joni Mitchell is. Although some of us have never forgotten Joni Mitchell . . . Dave Fanning, for example, recently devoted an excellent radio programme to her . . . she threatened retirement 10 years ago, and then vanished.

As a musician, she has been enormously influential . . . and not just on Prince, who has always loved her. As a songwriter, she has had her songs covered by the finest bands of several generations. Anyway, it is hard to explain music and I'm not going to wear myself out here.

If you want to know more, you should go out and buy some of her albums.

She has a new one, Shine, her 23rd, coming out at the end of the year.

Mitchell is now 63 years old, and has been a successful musician since she was 21. She has made the music industry a lot of money. She wrote a song about David Geffen ('A Free Man In Paris') back in the days when he was a music industry executive, and before he teamed up with Spielberg and became a Hollywood player. That's why we should listen to her when she says that the music industry is run by "pornographic pigs".

These are not the ruminations of an embittered loser, but of an internationally successful professional. It's kind of like Roy Keane saying that the FAI is perhaps not managed in the way that it might be. You've got to listen. The English songwriter Amanda Ghost interviewed Mitchell recently for BBC Radio 2 and said "Joni believes she is written off as a soppy housewife's favourite as opposed to a valid artistic voice".

When Mitchell started out she was marketed by the record company as "ninety per cent virgin". She wasn't too happy then . . . on a biological basis alone: she had already had a child . . .

and she's not too happy now. "That's what happens when you don't show your tits, " she says.

What is great about Mitchell is that she is and always was such a musician, in her life as well as her work. As her male colleagues sexually indulged themselves on what was probably an unprecedented scale . . . let's not go there, okay? . . . Mitchell had affairs with her male colleagues. For this rather crowded example of serial monogamy, she was rewarded by Rolling Stonemagazine with the title 'Old Lady Of The Year'. That was in 1971. She didn't talk to the magazine for 10 years.

All musicians have a shelf-life as far as their record companies are concerned. Johnny Cash, who is now practically a saint as well as one of music's great posthumous earners, was famously dropped by his record company. But for women, the shelf life is scandalously short. By 1979, Joni Mitchell told Amanda Ghost, she felt the industry had had enough of her.

"It was my time to die. The bosses were looking, thinking, 'Oh, she's getting old now, she's just about 27.' They want to dispose of you and get a 14year-old in there."

So if you've ever wondered why there are so few female musicians in the public view who are over the age of 30, Joni has the answer. I cannot think of one female musician in any genre who is over 60 and performing and recording regularly. Joni Mitchell is on the cover of the Wo rd magazine at the moment. Now that is unusual.

The second part of Amanda Ghost's interview with Joni Mitchell is on BBC R2 on Tuesday night