Music Mystic

The NY Times has an interesting article on Rick Rubin, the bearded, guru-esque co-head of Colombia Records. Rubin sounds like a smart guy, with the right kind of mind to institute change in an industry that, to be honest, has been slouching towards its doom for quite a while now. His best idea is to offer an enormous networked music library to consumers, reachable through all kinds of devices for a monthly subscription fee. If the library was big enough, the cost low enough and the access ubiqituous enough, that might just work. It would probably rely on the player to be connected to the library to play anything, but with tech like Wimax on the horizon, that might be possible. Satellite radio runs on a similar model already, and it seems to be doing quite well.

A lot of the article focuses on Rubin's ability to pick successful musicians, and produce successful (and often ground-breaking) albums. It's such a cliche to imagine a record company guy seeing a show and saying "these guys are going to be huge!" but I think there's definitely a vital place for gurus and filters, particularly as now we have access to such an unimaginably large collection of media. Rubin's library will need it, and as long as someone like Rubin is running it, it will be great. If it's co-opted by soulless, tasteless, money-grubbing worms, then the whole system will probably implode. Again.