RETURN TO FOREVER

You crazy for this one, Rick.

Anyone interested in music should read the New York Times Magazine’s cover story on Rick Rubin. The story is a few weeks old now (published September 2). It’s an important piece, not only as a look into the life of Mr. Rubin, but as a survey of where the industry (and the art) stands. It’s like a buoy telling how close—or far—the music business is from where it came from and where it’s going.

My take is that the business is lost and drifting further from familiarity. I thought to write that the industry is “further from safety,” but I realized this: I’m indifferent to what happens to the current infrastructure. If it’s lost forever, oh well. Something better will come ashore. This is awkward to say since the current structure is the bread and butter for a number of my friends. My angle is more philosophical. It’s time for an overhaul.

Sony (the parent company) offered Mr. Rubin anything he’d like in exchange for running Columbia Records. Steve Barnett, the lone caretaker of Columbia before agreeing to let Mr. Rubin in the fold, wanted Mr. Rubin to “change the culture” of the label. The writer, Lynn Hirschberg, believes that Mr. Rubin was hired to do much more than this. The first question the story asks is: “Can Rick Rubin save the record business?”

Even with the inclusion of Mr. Rubin, a character of strong principles and exciting output, change remains elusive, even faceless. It’s obvious why the label barons look to a changing-of-the-guard as an essential first step to getting their profit margins back in order. The machine is slowing down; let’s get some new parts. But what if the machine isn’t slowing down? What if it’s just obsolete?

Ms. Hirschberg doesn’t take a side, though she encourages Mr. Rubin to. He hasn’t figured it out yet, at least not in the “ah-ha!” way he expects of himself. Mr. Rubin’s ideas bend from long overdue (he made Columbia agree to never use another plastic jewel case ever again) to “controversial” (Mr. Barnett disagrees that a subscription service will save the industry) to totally humane (“the most important thing we have to do now is get the art right”). He has no office but lots of assistants who scout bands and bring him protein shakes.

Mr. Rubin speaks beautifully on the nature of music. “So many of the decisions at these companies have not been about the music,” he says. “They sign artists for the wrong reasons—because they think somebody else wants them or if they need to have a record out by a certain date. That old way of doing things is obsolete, but luckily, fear is making the record companies less arrogant. They’re more open to ideas. So, what’s important now is to find music that’s timeless. I still believe that if an artist gains the belief of the listener, then anything is possible.” He couldn’t be more right or sound more genuine. Mr. Rubin is most logical when he describes the purpose of music.

Which makes Mr. Rubin a noble choice—for both president of Columbia and potential savior of the major label way of doing things. Better Mr. Rubin gets to puzzle over the issues of rampant downloading and the fall of radio and MTV than, say, a team of financial advisors who own a few copies of The Eagles Greatest Hits between them. As a producer, Mr. Rubin acts like the luckiest fan in the world, shutting his eyes and giving advice to Neil Diamond, Weezer, Metallica, the late Johnny Cash, as well as Mars Volta, Red Hot Chili Peppers, System Of A Down, and more. It’s uncertain how his artistic adoration will fare as the head chef of a giant label. “In the past, I’ve tried to protect the artists from the label,” he says. “Now my job would also be to protect the label from itself.” On taking the job, Mr. Rubin says he “thought it would be an interesting challenge.”

No one in Mr. Rubin’s position could feel surefooted, but as time elapses and the Times story arcs along, it’s evident that his confidence takes a hit. “It’s a big ship to turn around,” he vents. “Columbia is stuck in the dark ages. I have great confidence that we will have the best records company in the industry, but the reality is, in today’s world, we might have the best dinosaur.” Really, he’s speaking for all labels. That Mr. Rubin has been installed at Columbia is immaterial. It’s like volunteering to be a target in a shooting gallery that is already full of targets.

I’m being gloomy, which isn’t fair to music. As of right now, music—the art, the culture force—is amazing. It’s accessible and diverse. For the cost of my time and hard drive space, I’m able to digest dozens of albums a week. In the late nineties, when I was in high school, I worked three jobs at once. With the money I saved I’d go to Berkeley and spend $150 a month on albums. I still buy some music from Amazon, iTunes and from local bands. I signed up to eMusic for a couple months, but cancelled my subscription to see if I would miss it. Primarily, I download everything I can find from blogs and the website Albumbase.com. From Keyshia Cole to Pinback to King Crimson to the three-disc Tortoise retrospective, it’s all there. For free.

Why would I not enlarge my collection with downloading? I love hearing new music. In two months I downloaded 20 gigabytes of music, at least. That’s over 4,000 songs. In high school, when new albums were $10-$15, I couldn’t have afforded music in this volume with six or seven jobs. Even with the newer iTunes model I’d have $4,000 of new debt. I need music pretty bad. I also need room, board, and more clothes than I’m comfortable explaining. I can’t download fresh fennel or limited edition Geoff McFetridge tee shirts.

This psuedo-criminal accessibility is a mixed bag. There are lots of losers, mainly the labels, but also the producers and engineers and lawyers and agents. The whole industry hedged bets on the current system. Sadly (in some cases), the whole business deserves the wake up call it’s getting as album sales disintegrate and Apple—seemingly overnight—vacuums up monies that Sony (and the other majors) earned for decades. Mr. Rubin has a solution, though Mr. Barnett (the Columbia co-president) doesn’t believe in it. Mr. Rubin wants to let fans access every song his major label owns (and all the live, bootleg, and demo versions of those properties) for a fixed monthly subscription price. In the article, he tosses off $20/month as a fair price.

It’s not a fair price. No one wants to just own Columbia’s catalog, especially if they will lose access to the songs if they end their subscription. Even if all the majors bonded together (which is—let’s be real—an impossibility) and allow all mankind to spend $20/month to access those catalogs, what additional monies would be necessary to hear independent music? How would this include the millions (or billions) of music lovers without internet?

I really dove into this story.

David Geffen appears in the Times article with the sort of don’t-you-know-who-I-am confidence that only David Geffen could get away with: “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.” Honestly, there are so many if’s and but’s orbiting the subscription model that I cannot comprehend why legends like Mr. Rubin and Mr. Geffen are willing to consider it. But Mr. Geffen—perhaps he does this subliminally—champions a subscription model that’s 75% cheaper than Mr. Rubin’s. This is an important distinction that got me thinking about a more important question: what if music was cheaper? What if music was really, really cheap?

I think price is the music industry’s biggest problem. Current music prices are the result of a now-Byzantine conduit of middlemen distributors that seemed essential 15 or 20 years ago. Albums that cost less than a dollar to print and package would be marked up and sold to distributors so the major labels made their profit margin before the consumer even knew an album was coming to the brick-and-mortar store. At which point the consumer would be paying $10 over what the label charged to cover the distribution and retail markups. The label would have already paid (or in most cases, not paid) its artists. The consumer—the “fan”—would ultimately be supporting the distributors and the store.

The growing digital market is already renegotiating price, though not drastically. ITunes says a song is worth a dollar and, with other online retailers following it’s comet tail, has set a new price standard (that the major label’s loathe). I don’t think a song is worth a dollar. I say that as an artist and a consumer. I think iTunes derived that price from the old-market system, where the consumer paid middlemen huge markups for 90 cents worth of plastic packaging and a disc. Without accounting for the one-time costs of writing and recording the music, iTunes’ cost of making a digital copy of the song available for sale is, essentially, nothing. The iTunes mark up is a modest—and modern—take on the major label’s system of exacerbated pricing.

A new price model needs to accomplish two goals: it needs to be more artist-friendly and more consumer-friendly. This is a huge challenge, since sharing music is the most artist-friendly thing ever. More people have my band's music than I could ever measure, just because Mr. Whomever can copy an entire hard drive of music in under an hour, or send an album in an instant message, or send a favorite song in an email. Artists benefit when the art of making music is more accessible than ever: more people go to shows, more venues exist to accommodate those people, and more merchandize exists to sell to the new audiences. There is, in general, more demand for music. A new pricing system, if drastic enough, would benefit an artist by better-measuring fan base. If albums cost a dollar (which isn’t necessarily what I’m proposing), then 50 Cent and Kanye West wouldn’t be selling 400,000-900,000 units in the first week. They’d be selling millions of albums a day. That many people care about music. People just can’t afford to keep up with every artist at the current price, or they know they can get the album for free from a friend or online.

I witnessed a corollary situation not two weeks ago, in fact it was the day the article came out. My friend Nave came to visit me in San Francisco. We started trolling Haight Street and turned into Recycled Records, an all-vinyl, music geek bug-light. Mr. Nave collects vinyl for the right reason: it let’s him find out about older music for cheap. He’s built a formidable progressive rock collection. He dove right into the Return To Forever section of the store and found a record he was missing called Hymn Of The Seventh Galaxy. The clerk, the mustachioed talisman he was, observed Mr. Nave’s find and interrupted: “if you like that, you’ll definitely dig this.” He produced a Weather Report record called Mysterious Traveler. The clerk—Moses was his name—offered to “throw in” the Weather Report record for free if Mr. Nave bought the Return To Forever record. The whole transaction set him back four dollars.

Paying four dollars for two hours of music doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. It’s obviously sensible for archaic jazz-rock obscurities like Weather Report and Return To Forever. A major label like Columbia could digitally archive it’s back catalogue by the end of the week and sell the songs for ten cents on the dollar (or less). Imagine being able to download ten albums—ten hours of music—for ten bucks. I imagine a price shift this dramatic being equalized by the sudden augmentation of the market: eight year-olds could start collections of music and still have allowance money left over for candy and toys; die-hards could back up vinyl or CDs in a matter of hours; people downloading for free might be inclined to actually buy the music they can’t easily find online; and average, everyday listeners could worry less about their wallets and more about hearing more music. What’s more important than that?

The Times’ article mentions that Mr. Rubin created a “word of mouth department” at Columbia. He’s trying to study and harness the phenomenon of sharing. It’s not that complicated: the more music people have to share, the more music is shared. (And the more music shared, the greater the audience for current and future artists.) If I can hop online and buy 15 hours of Weather Report music for less than the cost of a single hour of Weather Report music at, say, Virgin Megastore, then I’m going have (at least) 15 times the music to discuss and share. And I’ll have money left over to obsess over (and invest in) the entire spectrum of collaborators, side projects, and influences.

From an economic perspective, a price cut makes the most sense for non-current releases, because a label like Columbia is sitting on generations of music that no one is hearing. It’s not expensive to distribute music digitally, so more music should be available. (The label would cover its digitizing and promotional costs in a day, surely.) This idea of an across-the-board price cut is not motivated by economics or popularity or availability. It’s motivated by morality. It’s based on the idea that the consumer should pay for the music—the created art—not the costs of distribution or the label’s expensive Hollywood headquarters. Consumers love music and they should pay for what they love. If that lessens the role of the label (or eliminates it), then so be it. As long as there’s a structure in place that allows the maximum number of artists to reach the maximum audience, then music will continue to grow. The more growth, the more room for monetization.

Whether or not the labels are in place to capitalize on the larger audiences is unclear. As I said, the price cut needs to benefit the artists and consumers. For musicians, embracing a price cut would take considerable modesty, a decent leap of faith, and (more) hard work. What if an artist wrote a great song and set up a Paypal account and sold a million tracks for 10 or 20 cents each? Then the artist could pay a publicist and manager flat rates to make sure everyone who’s anyone knows how successful the 10 cent song is. The artist can print some physical albums and merchandise cheaply as possible, making sure the physical items are economic and collectible, then commission a distributor a flat rate to service existing stores. The artist can pay an agent a percentage to book a tour and use the touring money to pay Mr. Rubin a flat rate to record the next record. Mr. Geffen might get left out, but he already has a billion dollars. He’ll be ok.

I don’t think that the Mr. Rubin interviewed for this story is ready to make the drastic decisions that the industry needs to stop the sales dive. I think the solution is more drastic than Mr. Rubin, Mr. Geffen, or Mr. Barnett discuss in this piece. I do think that Mr. Rubin has the right motives. If an artist gains the belief of the listener, then anything is possible.

I agree.

Rick Rubin on Johnny Cash.


Complicated music from Return To Forever.




BRILLIANT MP3's by RETURN TO FOREVER
(Click to download)

“Hymn Of The Seventh Galaxy” (from Hymn Of The Seventh Galaxy)
“Captain Marvel” (from Light As A Feather)

RETURN TO FOREVER on WIKIPEDIA.
RETURN TO FOREVER on MYSPACE.
RETURN TO FOREVER on LAST.FM.
RETURN TO FOREVER on YOUTUBE.