Via John’s always entertaining links comes this NYTimes profile of Rick Rubin, the mega-uber-supah-producer Columbia has hired to turn the company around.
It’s worth a read on its own merits, because the idea of a record company hiring someone who likes to help make music, as opposed to someone who likes to sell a product, makes me tingly. But I found myself contemplating Rubin’s assessment of the future of the music business- he envisions a subscription model, where you can listen to pretty much whatever you want, whenever you want, wherever you want, for a monthly fee, making ownership of music and the iPod obsolete.
Once I got over my knee-jerk negative reaction to the idea of a subscription model, I gave the idea some more thought. If, as Rubin describes, you’d actually be able to tell your music-playing device that you want to listen to Simon & Garfunkel, and then were actually able to listen to it, and then change your mind and listen to something else… why wouldn’t that be worth money?
And the answer is, OF COURSE it would be worth money… it’s just that the “ifs” are still really big IFs. But let’s back up a second, and talk about WHY.
All of this subscription vs. ownership talk misses the point. The reason people like “owning” music, the reason they like putting it on their iPods, isn’t about property rights most of the time. It’s about portability and convenience.
When I buy a CD and rip it to put on my iPod, or when I buy songs from the iTunes store, I know that no matter when I want to listen to the music, no matter where I happen to be at the time, I can turn my iPod on, and the music is there. It doesn’t matter if I bought it a year ago or an hour ago; it’s there. I can buy a really terrific Fiona Apple album, listen to it once or twice, get distracted by Mika for four months straight, and then rediscover the Blues Traveler album I bought in college completely on a whim in the middle of the afternoon at work… because the music is STILL on my iPod. Current subscription music models haven’t been able to replicate this experience well at all.
Like many music lovers, I not only enjoy listening to new stuff (thank you, XM, for teaching me about Silversun Pickups), but I also love being able to pull out a favorite older album if the whim strikes. I can and do listen to music this way, because even at only 8GB, my iPhone can still contain a striking variety and quantity of my music collection. Most of the time I can mimic some semblance of the instant gratification my musical tastes require.
On the other hand, like many music lovers, my collection exceeds the size of my portable device, and it’s only going to get larger, now that I’m married to another music lover. Since music is a natural mood-enhancer, and what I want to listen to at any given moment is largely determined by whim, I still can’t always hear exactly what I want to hear, just when I want to hear it. I still have to engage in a bit of educated guessing about what I might want to hear in the course of a few days, but since my habits are pretty established, I do okay with that.
On the other hand, I can go the route of the 160 GB iPod, but to upgrade to bigger and bigger iPod hard drives to house my ever-expanding music collection is really just an arms race that delays the inevitable.
So Rubin’s future, where everyone has some kind of device that can retrieve whatever you want, whenever you want, is not an idea without merit. The problem, of course, is the technical limitations of “whenever you want.” If “whenever” happens to be while I’m sitting in a coffee shop with free Wi-Fi, the download might be a little slow, but it’ll work. If “whenever” happens to be when I’m on a long flight, or at the office where our network use policy forbids music downloading, then the idea kind of falls flat. If I have to prepare for those situations by downloading a bunch of music I think I might want to listen to in advance… well, I might as well just go back to my iTunes library, where I pay less for the same level of delayed gratification.
But yes, in theory, if this subscription service could have pretty much any music I could possibly want to listen to, even the obscure, the old, the cutting-edge, and the band my friend just called to tell me about, AND I could access it from pretty much anywhere with a reasonable degree of convenience, sure… I’d go subscription. But that model essentially just turns the service’s servers into my outboard iPod, because again… the iPod isn’t about music ownership, it’s about convenience & portability.
And it’s for that reason that such a system wouldn’t render the iPod “obsolete,” as Rubin predicts. Does anyone seriously thing that an ecosystem that big, could develop while Apple ignored it? Hello, my iPhone and the iPod Touch already have Wi-Fi music downloading built in… it could not possibly be that hard to position them to support such a model.
