Best of luck to Rick Rubin
(cross-posted from my Globe and Mail blog)
The cover of the New York Times Magazine last weekend looked like it was selling a feature story about a religious guru, with a photo of a large, bearded man sitting crosslegged in a field, wrapped in a white blanket. And there’s no question that Rick Rubin — the music producer who was the subject of the cover story — is seen as a guru by many in the industry.
Rubin’s abilities have helped to create acts such as The Beastie Boys, and rescued fading stars such as The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Johnny Cash and Neil Diamond from oblivion. But can he save the entire industry? That’s the subject of the NYT piece, which goes into some detail about how iTunes and file-sharing have eviscerated the business, and how young music lovers pay little or no attention to the radio or buying CDs any more.
In fact, hiring a guy like Rubin — who refuses to attend meetings or have an office at Sony’s Columbia Records despite now being co-chief executive, and who wears cargo pants and a T-shirt instead of a suit — should be evidence enough that executives in the industry are scared out of their wits. And it’s clear that one of the things Rubin wants to focus on is the music, which would be a refreshing change.
As media mogul David Geffen puts it in the story:
“The music business, as a whole, has lost its faith in content… only 10 years ago, companies wanted to make records, presumably good records, and see if they sold. But panic has set in, and now it’s no longer about making music, it’s all about how to sell music.”
A couple of the other prescriptions for success that Rubin throws out in the piece, however, raise some fairly major question marks, and the first of those is the idea that the online music business has to adopt a subscription model in order to have any hope of staying alive.
The only problem with that idea is that no one has had any real success with the subscription approach, despite repeated attempts. Services such as Rhapsody, the new Napster and Yahoo Radio are still around and have users, but they are hardly growing. The bulk of music listeners simply don’t seem to be interested in subscribing to a kind of virtual radio station online, although some continue to support the idea.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs — who knows a thing or two about music online — has repeatedly said that he has no interest in offering a subscription service. “Never say never, but customers don’t seem to be interested in it,” Jobs told Reuters in an interview after Apple reported blow-out quarterly results. “The subscription model has failed so far.”
And Jobs is far from the only person who is skeptical of the subscription approach.
It’s true that part of the reason a subscription model hasn’t worked is that the record companies and other players — rights holders such as publishing companies and performance rights groups — haven’t been able to get their act together, and have spent most of their time coming up with new ways to screw people through DRM.
Unfortunately, there’s no sign that any of that is going to change anytime soon, with or without Rick Rubin.
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(On Sep 6th, 2007 at 12:29 pm)
That was an incredible article about Rick Rubin but it also talked a lot about the state of the music industry today. RR is going to need all the luck he can get to turn around a corporation that is still living in the Dark Ages! I don’t think he is going to last very long there because I think he will become frustrated with the corporate system and will give up. It was nice he was upset over the Neil Diamond 12 Songs disater but he sure got over it in a hurry to take that job!
As for the subscription idea it isn’t going to work. The reason people do file sharing or buying pirated media is because they can get music cheap or free. They aren’t going to pay $19.95 a month when somebody can undercut that price and I think it will just increase the practice of piracy and bootlegging.
I think the record companies have just sat on their collective butts far too long and the problem has gotten way out of control. I doubt they could do much to change it unless they really started enforcing the copyright laws and that would be a monumental task at this point because any moron with a good machine and a little computer knowledge can create professional quality websites for file sharing and music distribution and places like You Tube look the other way when copyrighted materials are shared on their site because they know it brings in the numbers.
If Viacom wins their case against them maybe that will change but until then record companies don’t have a prayer of gaining control of their own industry again.