In a recent article in New York Times magazine, Columbia Records co-head Rick Rubin, whose credentials include being founder of Def Jam Records, feels the very survival of the recorded music industry is at stake, and with the ever-declining numbers of traditional CD sales, he may be on to something.
I think it’s pretty clear that model is in major collapse mode these days, as evidenced by the ever-decreasing number of music retailers. We said goodbye to Tower Records last year, as well as Sam Goody. Goody and several other smaller chains have been swallowed up by the FYE (For Your Entertainment) chain, but if you’ve seen any of them lately, they’re carrying less inventory, and the stores are looking junkier and junkier. On the other hand, Wal-Mart, Amazon, and the iTunes Store with their electronic distribution of musical content is growing every day.
Rubin predicts that within the next ten years, the music industry is going to have to work together to migrate to a subscription business model. The idea being that for a monthly fee of, say, $19.95 or so, you will have access to virtual library, presumably DRM-encoded, over the air, over the net, in your car, and delivered to your home system with a “Walkman-like” device. Yes, in this brave new world, the iPod would be obsolete. He talked about the idea that you could grab any Simon and Garfunkle content, including bootleg concerts, demos, etc., and that’s where I have to raise some questions:
- Will this content be from a common supplier or will all record companies be able to set up their own stores and draw from a common library?
- How “deep” will these catalogs be? Will the mainstream labels make available the many thousands of titles never before released to the public in any form, or is this going to be strictly a popularity contest where genres such as jazz, classical, bluegrass, or for that matter Gregorian Chants will be ignored (as they currently are)?
- Will you have to set up accounts at $19.95 a month with each label?
- Will the little labels and distribution companies like eMusic, CDBaby, and others be allowed to join in their reindeer games?
Item 4 really concerns me, as I am a lover of extremely obscure jazz recordings. Will the little labels like New Orleans-based Jazzology or the Dutch label CrissCross and the thousands of others out there be permitted to join these consortiums? Yes, it’s all about me and my selfish desire to be able to listen to and purchase music by artists I like and not ones the big record companies choose to make available, oh, and to have the ability to play my music where, when, and how I want to.
The whole matter of DRM aside, this could be a great thing. Music companies complain about the cost of manufacturing and distribution. Well, stick ’em all on a humongeous server farm and let customers benefit from the lower distribution costs.
We are, however, talking about the record companies. Their track record in the past of fighting all modern technology, and defending, nearly to their death, their current distribution model and forcing DRM on their customers, who clearly don’t want it. They seemingly hate their customers, and want them to pay separately for each type of medium their customers use. Let’s see now…from 78 to 45 to LP to 4-track to 8-track to CD to MP3, all in about 40 years. What a great financial model–come up with a new media format every few years and get their customers to keep replacing their libraries with each new media format. The movie companies are doing the same thing–even compressing the time line going from DVD to the latest VHS vs Beta game (BluRay vs. HD-DVD).
Already some record company executives are against this idea. One noted that recordings by Al Jolson cost the same as ones from Justin Timberlake, and that the one-price model offered by the iTunes store doesn’t properly add premium pricing to “premium artists”. Others think the price needs to be much lower than $19.95/month, else piracy will be more rampant than ever.
Sooooo, can we trust the record companies to truly come up with an interesting out-of-the-box solution, or is this just the same old thing with the record companies cussing out Apple and taking over distribution for themselves?
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