Dear Rick Rubin (or Somebody): Why Not Surf the "Velocity of Music?"

Last week's New York Times profile of Rick Rubin has a lot of people talking. Some agree that Rubin, a great producer, has it in him to revolutionize the music biz. Others are more skeptical, including those who make a specialty out of skepticism. The question has two parts: 1) Can anybody save the music business? 2) If so, can Rick Rubin?

Then there's the implicit question: If by the "the music business" we mean the matrix of corporations that distribute recorded music today, should it be saved?

I think Rick Rubin's in a good position to change things, in part because of the "meta-message" that his biography sends: He's a producer - the kind that's an artist in his own right. He's a nurturer and admirer of artists. He's spiritual (that's important.) He's unconventional. And he loves music.

But, is he the right guy? Can he get the job done? Should Columbia and the other big companies be saved? I have no idea - but here's what somebody ought to try to do for the music business - and more importantly, for music:

1) Create a Mission Statement for the music industry,
2) convene a Brain Trust of the best minds he or she can find, and
3) understand and surf "the velocity of music."

Mission Statement

Nobody is asking the most fundamental question of all: What do we want "the music industry" to do? What are its goals, its reasons for being? Here's my answer, my suggested mission statement:

To enrich and bring joy to as many people as possible, with as little cost and effort as possible, while at the same time allowing those who create and distribute music to make a good living.

I don't care what the rest of it looks like. It's better not to care. That creates a good starting place for imagining what the rest of it should look like.

Some people are saying all music should be free, all the time. My answer to that is, who will write and make that free music? The last time I wrote about this topic somebody wrote me an email that went more or less like this: "F#&^ recorded music. I gig live and I make pretty good money."

Turns out he was in a Led Zeppelin tribute band.

I'm looking for a world where people can still earn a living writing great songs, recording original material, or creating art using technology-and-the-studio as an instrument. (Think Pet Sounds-era Brian Wilson, or for that matter the early Rick Rubin.) None of those art forms will survive, except in amateur form, if things keep going the way they are.

Operating Principles

So, if we take my goals for America's Top Music Business Model (stole that phrase from the Writers' Guild newsletter - sorry), we can get to the following principles:

1. Music should be cheap. (No more 0.99 cents a download, much less $1.29 without DRM. I agree with Bob Lefsetz on that one. Greed kills - in this case it's killing the music industry.)
2. Music should be easy to acquire and use. No more copy protection. No more clumsy online music store interfaces. Whenever and wherever you want it - cell phone, car, etc. - you should have it, with minimal-to-no effort.
3. Music should be fun to acquire and use. Being 13 years old in 1966 and going to Doubleday's in New York City to hear Between the Buttons for the first time was fun. Hearing a random excerpt from a song in iTunes - usually not the part with the hook - is much easier. But it's frustrating and annoying.
4. There need to be avenues for hearing the music you don't know you're going to love. I've written about this before, and said we need online guides who can lead us to the music we love. Dylan is one, with his Sirius radio show (which is why the RIAA was foolish to oppose this device, which could have sold a lot of music for them.) Ultragrrl's another. So are the best DJs.

So how does Rick Rubin (or somebody) take advantage of the Velocity of Music, nurture more online guides to spread the word about good music, and develop a good revenue stream?

Convene a Brain Trust

The advice I'd give Rick Rubin or any record exec is the same I'd give a Presidential candidate dealing with national security issues (not that either of them has asked me, come to think of it): find the smartest people you can, give them a direction, and go at it. It worked for Roosevelt in the Depression - and, believe me, the music industry is in a depression.

So who should be in the Brain Trust? No record company execs, please. Artists, managers, producers, computing and AI wizards, economists, poets - pretty much everybody mentioned in the spoken part of the Donovan song "Atlantis," plus anybody that gets namechecked in a William Gibson novel.

The Velocity of Music

The Velocity of Money is the term economists use to describe the number of times the same dollar is spent over a given period of time. If $100 goes to one person and she keeps it, that's $100 in transactions. If she give it to someone to provide a service, and they buy something with it, then $300 has been spent. Three people, not one, have each received $100. That's three times the velocity that the $100 would have had if she'd kept it to herself.

(I'm grossly oversimplifying. The Velocity of Money is actually defined as

- but I digress.)

The Velocity of Music is my phrase for what happens whenever somebody else acquires a piece of recorded music. Music's "velocity" has never been higher, thanks to the Internet and file sharing, but nobody's figured out a way to make money from that velocity - yet.

Here's a model worth kicking around: First the Internet, radio, and other communication technologies will allow you to locate somebody you trust - the equivalent of the guy who owned that corner record shop in Brooklyn in the 1950's, or the Rolling Stones in the 60's (I found a lot of great artists just by looking to see who'd written the songs on December's Children.) Or, for that matter, Dylan and his radio show. (He played "Operator" by Sister Wynonna Carr. I love that song.)

They're the real-time evangelists for music, both new and old. In the New Musical Order, they should also become its distributors, its "virtual retailers." Which gets us to this: New distribution technologies should enable them sell the music they love and promote, for a few pennies per song. Split the pennies with them, and make sure the lion's share of what you (the record company) receive goes to make more music.

It's more important to keep that Velocity of Music going, to create a wave of enthusiasm and ride it, than it is to milk every transaction for as much as you can get. That means doing more than just trying to find the next Britney, or Christina, or whomever. Mine those back catalogs, the ones that are bought and paid for, and find virtual retailer channels for selling it.

The Architecture of It All

I've drawn the charts in my head and they look like this. (What, you can't see them? They're right there.) If I were skilled enough, there would be a graphic here that would show a music fan on the left. In the middle would be "virtual retailers" using digital music sales platforms (like websites, online stores, digital purchasing devices, add-ons to iPod-like devices, etc.) Underneath the virtual retailers would be music businesses that find and record artists, develop the technology, and support the retailers. On the right would be the artists themselves (with a dotted line to the music businesses.)

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Someone needs to convene a Brain Trust and let them design a working model. That might consist of my design, or of the subscription model Rick Rubin talks about in the article.Anything's fine with me - as long as somebody figures out how to keep the music coming.

The subscription model Rick mentions ($19.95 for all the music you'll ever want) is based on the work of Gerd Leonhard and his idea of "Music Like Water," that would be available in unlimited amounts for a monthly fee. That would require a back-end technology to divide the money back to companies and artists based on usage, but that's a simple task in tech terms.

There are also intermediate steps, like a subscription service for Columbia product only, that an individual exec like Rick Rubin could explore without bringing in his peers. But to make that fly, Columbia would have to throw in a lot of exciting extras to make people sign up. Not impossible - but it needs a Brain Trust to design it.

Lastly, here's a heretical thought: The CD is not dead. It's just not the cornerstone of the business anymore. If CD packaging becomes more like a coffee-table book, people will buy the occasional CD as a luxury item. It won't dominate the industry anymore, but it will always have a place. I'll bet good money on that.

There's more to discuss - like when, where, how, and if record companies should take a percentage of merchandising sales (I say "yes" - but only if it's a sale the artist couldn't have made on their own, and even then only for a reasonable percentage. If the recording company is finding new revenue from the artist, not looting the revenue they've already got, it's a win for everybody. But that means finding new ways to sell merchandise - hello, Brain Trust?)

Will somebody fix the music industry? Will the dinosaurs that dominate it today somehow learn to walk upright? I don't know - but if they don't, I hope somebody else comes along to build the model of the future. Whether it's Immortal Technique or the Blue Sky Boys, I like to think that I'll be able to find and hear the music I love for the rest of my life - and that the people who make it available can survive economically so that it keeps coming.

A Night Light
The Sentinel Effect: Healthcare Blog
Future-While-U-Wait
RJ Eskow at the Huffington Post

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UPDATE: Turns out that fellow HuffPo'er Tony Sachs, while more of a skeptic on Rubin, pretty much agrees with me about CDs. He's skeptical about an all-industry subscription service, too - although my answer is for each company go it alone, at least for now. I used to haunt Tony's store, NYCD, when it was in physical and not virtual space. He's a good example of the "virtual retailers" the record companies should promote with tech and other resources. Check out what he wrote.

(But, Tony - Clive Davis?)

Follow RJ Eskow on Twitter: www.twitter.com/rjeskow

Comments

[priorzola]

Pt. 2. Additionally Rubin (or somebody) may want to revisit the John McCain bill that would have limited the number of broadcast licenses issued to one company. This bill would have had the effect of allowing many lower watt stations to broadcast to a smaller area (ie. a college campus or rural-only areas) withot needing huge expensive towers.

At one time, most radio stations were locally owned and operated with DJs who were entrusted by their bosses and their listeners alike to play good music. This is how, from country music to soul, most artists broke, first regionally and then through the graces of well-known DJs nationally.

The Clear Channeling of America has led to the watered-down sound that we hear today. These days it's virtually impossible to tell where an act is from because there's little in the way of a local sound. Most Americans (including future musicians) get exposed to the same Clear-Channeled and MTV approved often formulaic 30 singles each week leaving very little room for diversity. Allowing more locally-owned stations broadcast a greater variety would expose more music to more people and may even propel American music forward.

An example I always use when making this point is John Peel. John Peel was a great English DJ on the BBC. On his show (which was broadcast throughout Britain) he was given the ability to play pretty much whatever he wanted. Since the BBC is a state-run non-commercial radio station, there was no concerns about pleasing or displeasing sponsors. Because of this great leverage John Peel had, he was able to break a good number British and, even, American acts in the UK.

There was once a time when American DJs wielding such influence, well before the existence of Clear Channel. Pursuing the goals of the McCain bill could allow for every town to have it's own John Peel or Alan Freed or Nic Harcourt. This can only be a help to promoting American music.

[priorzola]

Unless Rick Rubin wields any power with the RIAA, the Copyright Royalty Board, or the FCC then he won't be terribly effective in reversing the hell-bent direction of the industry. The RIAA, the CRB and the FCC (once considered protectors of musicians, songwriters, and American music as a cultural phenomenon) have become special-interest pawns. These organizations have gone out of their way to penalize fans (the RIAAs numerous and highly suspicious cases of suing dowloaders), impinge on the rights of online radio sources such as Pandora to promote more obscure (ie. anything that's not necessarily in the top forty) music by greatly enhancing the amount of online stations would have to pay to broadcast a song; and allowing the continual virtual monopoly of the so-called public airwaves by the likes of CBS Radio and Clear Channel.

Rubin (or somebody) will need to remind the RIAA that to sue the people who keep you business (more on the auspices of the those who run the labels than the artists themselves) is not the best business tactic. The RIAA also needs to utilize it's annual celebration (The Grammys) as a method of promoting more than yet another Justin Timberlake single. The cold hard fact is that pop music represents a far lesser amount of sales than most would suspect yet it gets what seems like 90% of the attention by radio, MTV, and other "traditional outlets".

Once upon a time, you could tune into the Grammys and see the likes of Yo Yo Ma and Bill Monroe, etc. Now you're lucky to see Chick Corea backing up Christina Aquilera. Although all these other forms of music don't rank highly on sales charts, the majority of it's listeners still buy the hard product; they're older and don't tend to download.

[Guitarsandmore]

First, movie soundtracks provide some of the best music available yet when you purchase a DVD you can only watch the movie. What I would do is make available on a deluxe version of the DVD all of the songs that could be played first as audio tracks and then secondly as video tracks (assuming a video was made for each song). That would be nice to have.

Albums were popular in no small part because of the art work on the cover, the liner notes, and other gifts provided. CDs and DVDs sometimes have art included but the CD is about a tenth the size of an album and so the size of the prize is diminished as well. You’ re looking at postage stamp size piece of art instead of poster size piece of art work. Bring back posters to be included with the CD and DVD and also include software that would allow the art work to be printed out for free. Don’t be greedy.

So my product for example would be a DVD of say “ City of Angels” with all of that wonderful music included on the DVD for free plus giant posters of Meg Ryan with Nicolas Cage wondering through the city, the forest, and the heavens. Throw in some sheet music for free as well in the form of power tabs.

Where is all of the Dave Mathews music that was on the “Because of Winn Dixie” DVD? We all love that movie and you can’t buy that music anywhere. They didn’t even make a movie soundtrack available as a separate CD. What was the marketing department thinking there? No think. No sale.

There isn’t anything wrong with Napster. They’re just not doing any marketing at all. Napster offers convenience and solves storage problems.

[Brettster]

Speaking as somewhat of an insider (I have a degree in music industry and am a musician, and work in the industry), I think Rick Rubin has exactly the right attitude, and he's definitely proven himself to be a savior in the industry a miraculous amount of times.

I'm not sure if there's any place in the future for bohemoth companies like Columbia, but the changes he is making are all positive. However, I think he is off-track on the subscription model idea. It's a logical sounding idea, but I don't think it takes in account some vital considerations. First, I don't think people like the idea of just one huge trough that everybody has equal access to. I think people like having their own personal collections, adding to them and sharing them with others. Your music collection is a reflection of you, it's a tradition as old as recorded music. How weird would it be to erase all those times when you're browsing the CD collection of the person you're with, or taking their iPods and scanning through their lists? It's a window into their souls, really. People want to OWN their music, not rent it from one central library. That's why iTunes has taken off and Napster is far behind.

The other part of it is one of the main draws of the illegal sharing is that you can get all sorts of cool bootlegs and rare tracks. If the subscribe-only library didn't include EVERYTHING you can get by other means, then it's not going to wipe out illegal downloading.

You are on the right track too, though you didn't make any real specific ideas. One thing we do know is that music WILL find a way to persist one way or another. I just hope we can create a system that will nurture and flourish the way it should, and not drag everyone along the pavement in every direction.

[RJ Eskow - Huffpost Blogger]

Aw, c'mon - I tried to be specific! I talked about:

- a mission statement
- a brain trust
- empowering 'virtual retailers'
- a single-company subscription service
- coffee-table CD packaging

You're a tough boss! Are you a bandleader, by any chance?

[Brettster]

aha! You may have got me there, I do tend to take charge of my bands!

I certainly didn't mean to put you down. It's just that in order to "save" the industry, it's clearly going to demand a full-scale upheaval across the board. But with that said, a chaotic collapse could turn out horrible. With so many models existing now but not really taking off, the future, sustainable industry model is obviously going to need to be very nuanced and intelligent with very specific logistics bringing so many separate institutions together. That's all I was trying to say. You're absolutely right that people need to really nail down what they want the music industry to really do, the mission statement is a good starting point.

Empowering "virtual retailers" is a great thing that I think is sorely missing right now. Radio is dead. We don't have musical gurus anymore like we used to. We need that back. But "how?" is the question. I think people like having a common guidance, and not just wading in millions of different niches. I miss living through generational "eras" of music and not just every person for himself like it's becoming (for good music, at least).

Pandora has a pretty mindblowing system for finding new music, I think that kind of thing needs to be allowed to permeate. However, what has been unsaid is that those models as well as subscription models completely rely on technology we don't really have yet. We need ubiquitous broadband Internet access first!

We need art back with our music. I think the future of album artwork will be something like artist-created screensavers. Imagine the little navigation screen playing a montage of Sgt. Peppers imagery with the songs on the album, or the Pink Floyd covers coming alive!

I could go on and on, these are VERY interesting times. The possibilities are endless, I just hope they become fully realized. One thing is certain, the 4 stuffy old executives and Clear Channel model is in the dust and should not be tolerated.