A few words from a professional procrastinator

In a recent NY Times interview with music producer Rick Rubin as he predicts that iPods will be obsolete, he endorses the subscription model as used by Napster and other music rental services. MacNN also notes that David Geffen also sees the subscription model as the way to save the music industry.

Hmmm, save the music industry, but apparently not the musicians. In some ways, Mr. Rick Rubin is true. The iPod will be obsolete but not the in the foreseeable future I’m afraid. The music industry has been clueless into saving it’s business since the age of Napster (the original P2P network) and mp3 came about. It is easy to forget that this subscription model was already around even before the launch of the iPod and the iTunes Store and still it didn’t convince people to get their music from there since basically they didn’t own the music. It was like an apartment, you rent it. CRAZY!

Now that the iTunes store is quite successful in it’s own right, they just want a cut off everything. They do not see the amount of bandwidth that Apple has to pay to keep the store running. They do not see the amount of people now buying music legally. They do not see that it is not the iTunes store that drives the sales (since the iTunes store is only accessible in mostly western countries apart from Japan. It is a way for people to buy music that they can play on their iPods seamlessly. How bad it that?

Most online retailers do not support Apple’s Fairplay DRM and thus scaring away most iTunes users (iTunes comes free BTW) and how exactly would it be better for us. I don’t have a PC so if I want to buy music, I want it working on my iPod. Because that’s what I want and not what music executive wants. At the end of the day what I want mattters anyway since it’s my money being spent around.

People buy CD’s, or at least they used to. People buy music they do not rent it.

Let’s look back with the iTunes-Pepsi commercial featuring Green Day’s song and all these kids who were sued by the music industry for downloading music off the internet.