Here’s an article by the NY Times about industry mogul co-founder of Def Jam Rick Rubin’s latest switch to Columbia Records. (If you don’t know about Rick Rubin, then find out.)
There’s two problems with this article
- It’s very long
- It’s written in a pretencious narrative style that can be annoying
However, there’s a lot of good material as well.
Rubin has a bigger idea. To combat the devastating impact of file sharing, he, like others in the music business (Doug Morris and Jimmy Iovine at Universal, for instance), says that the future of the industry is a subscription model, much like paid cable on a television set. “You would subscribe to music,” Rubin explained, as he settled on the velvet couch in his library. “You’d pay, say, $19.95 a month, and the music will come anywhere you’d like. In this new world, there will be a virtual library that will be accessible from your car, from your cellphone games, from your computer, from your television. Anywhere. The iPod will be obsolete, but there would be a Walkman-like device you could plug into speakers at home. You’ll say, ‘Today I want to listen to … Simon and Garfunkel,’ and there they are. The service can have demos, bootlegs, concerts, whatever context the artist wants to put out. And once that model is put into place, the industry will grow 10 times the size it is now.
The article is a good read mainly because it gives hope for the record industry.
