Rick Rubin Wants To Get In On This Web 2.0 Thing

noah | September 4, 2007 12:30 pm
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Sunday’s edition of the New York Times Magazine had the always-entertaining gambit “Can Person X save the music business?” as its cover tagline; the man in question was Rick Rubin, the Def Jam founder/khaki pant-wearing guru who became co-head of Columbia Records in May. Lynn Hirschberg’s lengthy, somewhat oddly structured profile gave a glimpse at Rubin’s strategies for the future sound of Columbia (Beth Ditto and Neil Diamond and the guy who won Britain’s Got Talent, yes; mewly singer-songwriter dudes who have one song worth hearing, no), how the rootkit fiasco almost made him swear off the record company for life, and his plans to market the music, including an in-house “word of mouth” department and a pie-in-the-sky plan to have all the majors band together in their time of woe, Care-Bears-Stare style.

First, Rubin’s plan to create a “word of mouth” department–essentially a way for twentysomethings to get paid and talk up the awesome bands on Columbia, which grew out of an intern program held this summer:

This summer, Columbia Records began a program called Big Red. The company invited 20 college students from Harvard, Penn State and the University of Miami to work on various music projects. The interns concentrated mostly on the digital marketing and promotions departments in Columbia’s offices in Midtown Manhattan, which are on Madison Avenue in a granite skyscraper designed by Philip Johnson.

At the end of their paid internships, the students took part in focus groups that were closely observed by Steve Barnett, Rubin’s co-head at the label, and Mark DiDia, whom Rubin brought in as head of operations, as well as by other Columbia executives. The focus groups may have been the real point of Big Red — Barnett and the New York executives, especially those who had been at Sony for years, wanted to try to take the pulse of the elusive music audience. “The Big Red focus groups were both depressing and informative, and they confirmed what I — and Rick — already knew,” DiDia told me afterward. “The kids all said that a) no one listens to the radio anymore, b) they mostly steal music, but they don’t consider it stealing, and c) they get most of their music from iTunes on their iPod. They told us that MySpace is over, it’s just not cool anymore; Facebook is still cool, but that might not last much longer; and the biggest thing in their life is word of mouth. That’s how they hear about music, bands, everything.”

As an offshoot of that program, Columbia has developed a “word of mouth” department–made up, in large part, of alums from the Big Red program–that “will function as a publicity-promotional arm of the company, spreading commissioned buzz through chat rooms across the planet and through old-fashioned human interaction.” Sure, why not–especially if the people at Columbia can cut corners by paying the kids intern-level non-wages–but isn’t the whole point of “word of mouth” the fact that it isn’t “commissioned buzz,” but that it comes from peoples’ friends–i.e., people who can be trusted, not just people who swoop into message boards in order to big up the C- and D-list members of the roster? (Not to mention that anyone who’s ever moderated an obviously planted positive comment about a band or a site knows just how tough it is to offer up scripted “word of mouth” in a skillful way.) Sure, this department’s ethos is dressed up in Web 2.0 Facebooky lingo, but at its core it just seems like another top-down way to exert control over consumers; “you will accept our buzz, you will trust us, because of our institutional authority,” it’s essentially saying, and if anything, that’s exactly why the majors are in the trouble they’re in. For all of Rubin’s visionary past, this idea just sounds like a reheating of a lousy marketing plan that I saw used on every crummy Web 1.0 application back in 1999.

Then there’s Rubin’s plan to inspire people to pay for music again:

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, 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.” …

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.”

Given the competition among record companies, the subscription model is bound to be tricky to organize and implement. One problem with iTunes is that, with some exceptions, all the songs are priced equally — a Justin Timberlake smash costs the same as an Al Jolson classic. Since a listener would, ideally, pay more for a Top 10 hit, that egalitarian system costs record companies potential millions of dollars. The opponents of the subscription model feel that making all music by all artists available for one flat fee will end up diminishing the overall revenue stream. They would also have to pool their talent, which is difficult for companies that have spent decades fighting over who signs with whom to accept. “There would have to be a new economic plan,” Geffen explained. “And it would have to be equitable, depending on the popularity of the artists.”

Someone’s been reading the Lefsetz Letter, eh? Anyway, even in this crap time for the business, there are people at the top of every record company who are digging in their heels about various digital-music distribution details, from pricing to partnerships to ridiculous deals with sites that are willing to bend to their terms. (The squabbling over file formats alone would probably take up at least two years, allowing even more customers to rush to filesharing services.) While it’s nice that at least one high-level executive is sort of looking into the future as far as distribution methods go, it may be time to say that the ship for all-together-now peer-to-peer services may have sailed, and think about different ways to make money. And be prepared for the fact that those “different ways” may not result in houses on the beach in Malibu and headquarters designed by I.M. Pei being in the realm of affordability.

And that’s part of the reason why the piece at its core was actually kind of sad; even those people who are seen as “visionaries” by the business are unwilling/unable to think in a truly new way and, at the same time, can get completely stymied by the glacially paced corporate culture of big music. (Rubin’s attempts to turn the label’s packaging green–by ditching the jewel box–have seemingly come to a standstill after his announcement of said plans in the spring.) Sure, at least he isn’t trying the whole “lovemarking” idea, but the whole sanctioned buzz branch hasn’t fallen too far from that particular tree.

The Music Man [NYT]

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