This Sunday The New York Times Magazine’s cover story asked whether Rick Rubin — the famous record producer who recently became co-head of Columbia Records — can “save the music business.” As part of an attempt to do just that, Mr. Rubin conducted an informal bit of market research, asking 20 college students about their classmates’ music-listening habits. A Columbia executive summed up the results: The kids all said that a) no one listens to the radio anymore, b) they mostly steal music, but they don’t consider it stealing, and c) they get most of their music from iTunes on their iPod. They told us that MySpace is over, it’s just not cool anymore; Facebook is still cool, but that might not last much longer; and the biggest thing in their life is word of mouth.
Most campus-network administrators will find those admissions less than revelatory, but Columbia is taking the “word of mouth” thing pretty seriously: Mr. Rubin is planning to hire a group of college students and other twentysomethings to hit up online chat rooms and attempt to spread buzz about the label’s acts.
On one level, the plan makes a certain amount of sense. Robert LaRose, a professor at Michigan State University, has concluded that students who swap files online often do so to make personal connections, not just to score free music. So record labels that want to survive in the digital era would do well to stake out a role in the Web’s social marketplace.
But for the most part, the Internet street-team project feels pretty flimsy. Millennials who’ve spent time on Facebook and in chat rooms can often be pretty skilled at playing “spot the shill,” and a dearth of publicity doesn’t seem like the recording industry’s biggest problem anyway.
Piracy, on the other hand, is a more serious issue for the music business, and Mr. Rubin has a plan for that, too. He argues that record companies should band together to sell a subscription service that offers on-demand access to music from computers, cell phones, and car stereos. —Brock Read
