Music by subscription

[mdlbear]

Rick Rubin - Recording Industry - Rock Music - New York Times

Rubin [the new head of Columbia Records] 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, 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."

From Napster to the iPod, the music business has been wrong about how much it can dictate to its audience. "Steve Jobs understood Napster better than the record business did," David Geffen told me. "IPods made it easy for people to share music, and Apple took a big percentage of the business that once belonged to the record companies. The subscription model is the only way to save the music business. If music is easily available at a price of five or six dollars a month, then nobody will steal it."

For this model to be effective, all the record companies will have to agree. "It's like getting the heads of the five families together," said Mark DiDia, referencing "The Godfather." "It will be very difficult, but what else are we going to do?"

Rubin sees no other solution. "Either all the record companies will get together or the industry will fall apart and someone like Microsoft will come in and buy one of the companies at wholesale and do what needs to be done," he said. "The future technology companies will either wait for the record companies to smarten up, or they'll let them sink until they can buy them for 10 cents on the dollar and own the whole thing."

As usual, I'm pretty sure this is part of the answer, but not the whole answer. If you have to subscribe, how does that get enforced? How does anyone know whether you're a subscriber when they hand you a URL? How does anyone know that the URL points to music?

The only thing that makes sense is to bundle the price into everybody's ISP fees, exactly the kind of surcharge that many countries now add to recording media.

I've been down this road before.

Comments

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

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Feel free to delete this comment.

[mdlbear]

Fixed.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

So why not just fund it through taxes, hmmm? Probably wouldn't cost more than $1/year.

Socialist solutions are looking better and better.

[mdlbear]

Won't fly politically. Call it a surcharge on bandwidth, payable to some industry consortium, and it flies in spite of the fact that it amounts to the same thing in the end.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Might fly in the EU, at least. I'd really rather not be paying taxes to keep the music industry in business. Yes, they do some useful things. They are also awesomely greedy, and responsible for a great deal of misery for musicians. Hey, maybe Google...

[mdlbear]

As long as the money goes directly to the songwriters, composers, and performers I don't have a problem with it. And I'm sort of OK with the fact that record labels are the intermediaries for their performers (having just been through that exercise), as long as performers can get their money directly if they aren't signed with a label. Currently they mostly don't, which is a problem.