Rick Rubin on the Record Industry

Filed in The Music Business 3 comments
Rick Rubin

Rick Rubin

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

  1. It’s very long
  2. 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.

Posted by admin   @   6 September 2007 3 comments
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3 Comments

Comments
Oct 17, 2007
10:50 am

The web is saturated with articles and blogs about the death of the music industry & what Madonna, Radiohead and the like in collusion with web 2.0 digital models and P2P sites are doing to the industry … “killing it”?
But this IS the new industry … a place where the majority of content is created and consumed for free, where the creativity embodied on your musical content IS the value attributed to it.
True creativity will become a form of money; so you may download my music for free, but that creativity still has value – value enough for me to extract a service from you or your peers in exchange. A system where money becomes less important than trade.
A place where the merit in music conquers all. Or at least in the years to come it will.

It is my absolute belief that “where music leads all else will follow” .. that is the breakdown of the commercial music industry to elements of trade, file sharing, swapping & purchase will one day encompass our whole online commercial structure.
Merit and creative truth will rule, meaningless content (read “pop”) will simply become ignored meaninglessness, and it will struggle for any traction.

The sharing and spread across digital platforms of all online services and products will occur, with value being judged by merit. This will occur whether we are talking about a music track, a new product or a simple day to day service.
Advertisers will no longer be able to saturate our TV screens with useless products and thinly veiled lies about necessity – purchase value & immediacy will be decided by the purchaser.

ok, …. deeper : the human mind is a spark of the almighty consciousness of the creator, imagination and creativity are the doors from which this consciousness emerges.
As human minds develop further and become more fully tuned to the nature of spirit, by stopping thought, abandoning knowledge & trusting intuition, creativity also becomes more fully tuned to this truth. That is, music / knowledge / content / product is freed from the shackles of blind commercialism, prejudice or banality will simply cut through and gain traction by the simple fact of its creative merit.
The deeper the self realization of a person and his/her creativity, the more he/she influences the whole universe by subtle creative vibrations.

Silence is the potent carrier of the present tense. Every sound or action comes from silence & dies back into the ocean of silence.
You choose by your actions how you may disrupt this silence – choose wisely.

Death to the music industry, long live the industry of creativity.

Feb 27, 2008
6:39 am
#2 culture :

gareth…

u need a girlfriend. at least a prostitute who won’t let u have sex with her without a condom. ur comments sound like frank frazeetta should have done the cover! i honestly would like for u to repeat that good stab at philosophy to ur neighborhood grocer. then tell me how much does peanut butter cost in creativity.

i love the music industry. i think what a lot of u guys wine about is that u are actually not inspired enough to actually create, but mimic. and when u change the snare, or u rock guys make up names that have no relation to what u play, u call it innovation. please! it all starts with courage.and most of u guys are creative cowards.

then, there are those of you who equate weird with creative. and that the world cant go where ur going. if that’s the case, why make records? why try to outwardly communicate and get mad that u can’t communicate effectively? then say that the world isn’t ready. well, we’ve already had Jim Morrison, Pink Floyd, Parliament Funkadelic, Bjork and Portishead all communicate weird in ways that connected with people all across the world. u cant say it’s not possible. so we’re gonna have to conclude u can’t do it.

so all yall… stop with the bitters and get ur grind right. and understand that where there is there is fluctuation, there is always oppurtunity. it only takes a little courage. but wait, i covered that a little earlier…

Apr 12, 2008
2:14 pm
#3 ms :

i agree with gareth.
this person calling her/himself culture sounds too “simple” to put it nicely, ” dumb” would be my preferred word choice.
what is your definition of “weird” communication?
I think I can be certain that the breadth of communication that you consider to not be “weird” is very very narrow.
You can’t compare creativity and art which are non-material, non-physical in the first place to
a grocery item such as peanut butter. They have fundamentally different qualities.
This is like comparing the human interactions to animal interactions: eg; wondering why your pet tiger doesn’t love you back even though you buy her flowers every day.
Your metaphors are so reductive, and your post so obviously fueled by unchecked emotional baggage from past experiences ( I assume that you are someone who thinks that you are very creative but feel alienated by all those “weird” kids that “can’t communicate” in the main stream way that you can because you still feel creatively inferior) that I had the urge to post a reply my first time at this website.

Also, that comment about prostitutes seems completely unnecessary and out of line. It doesn’t even make sense as a joke!

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