A Genuine Music Guru

You can't properly observe Labor Day by writing a column, so Frank Rich is off again this week. But that doesn't mean there's not anything interesting in The New York Times. Today's Sunday magazine has a lengthy cover feature on Rick Rubin, record producer and, it's hoped, savior of the record industry.

Through file sharing and iTunes, recorded music is all around us, but the traditional record companies aren't making a lot of money at it at the moment. And it's not just music, but that's a problem that a lot of content is having these days. Newspapers and magazines, book publishers, and various other last generation content industries are finding that profit's getting harder and harder to generate. I've got no great love for media conglomerates, but the reality is that they're a significant source of money to be made by writers, performers, and other artists. Rubin, who's recently taken a position atop Columbia Records, explains the details as they relate to the recording industry:

"Until very recently," Rubin told me over lunch at Hugo's, a health-conscious restaurant in Hollywood, "there were a handful of channels in the music business that the gatekeepers controlled. They were radio, Tower Records, MTV, certain mainstream press like Rolling Stone. That's how people found out about new things. Every record company in the industry was built to work that model. There was a time when if you had something that wasn't so good, through muscle and lack of other choices, you could push that not very good product through those channels. And that's how the music business functioned for 50 years. Well, the world has changed. And the industry has not."

. . .
"In the past, I've tried to protect artists from the label, and now my job would also be to protect the label from itself. So many of the decisions at these companies are not about the music. They are shortsighted and desperate. For so long, the record industry had control. But now that monopoly has ended, they don't know what to do."

Rubin's got a solution that would be quite a stretch for Columbia and other record companies, and I'm not sure it sounds too appealing to me, either, but if we're smashing paradigms, I suppose we should smash paradigms.

To combat the devastating impact of file sharing, [Rubin], 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, 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."

Maybe. And if not that, then it will probably have to be something just as radical. But regardless, in the short term it will be interesting to see how long the partnership between Columbia and Rubin can last. I'm not sure Rubin can save the music industry, but if he can't, I'm not sure who's a more likely candidate.