"iPod will be obsolete" says record label boss

 

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By Simon Aughton

Posted on 3 Sep 2007 at 11:59

The boss of the world's oldest record label believes the future of the music industry lies in subscriptions.

Rick Rubin, one-time record producer and now co-chairman of Columbia Records, told the New York Times that only by making music cheaply and readily available can the music industry recover from its current plight.

"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," he says.

"You'd pay, say, $19.95 a month, and the music will come anywhere you'd like," he explains. "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."

As a result the iPod will disappear. "The iPod will be obsolete, but there would be a Walkman-like device you could plug into speakers at home," he believes. "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."

Aside from the assumption that the record industry should or needs to tackle music "theft" - a strong case can be made for not doing so - Rubin appears not to have noticed that subscription services have been around for some time, but consumers are not interested in paying over-and-over again to listen to the same track.

Trying to persuade music fans to stop "stealing" music is hard enough. Offering something that they don't want as an alternative is unlikely to be the best way of going about it.

Which appears to be the view of Rubin's fellow Columbia chairman Steve Barnett.

"Smart people have told me if the subscription model is not done correctly it will be the final nail in our coffin," he says. "I've heard both sides of the argument, and I'm not convinced it's the solution to our problems. Rick wants to be a hero immediately. In his mind, you flick a switch and it's done. It doesn't work like that."