In\u00c2\u00a0 retrospect, hiring Rick Rubin to run Big Red was a massive mistake.<\/p>\n
Yup, Rick’s running it.\u00c2\u00a0 From a distance.\u00c2\u00a0 He doesn’t go to the office, he doesn’t communicate, he dropped a ton of acts, there’s a wild cabal running the label and the worker bees have no clue what’s going on.<\/p>\n
How did this happen?<\/p>\n
A fuck-up this bad hasn’t been "masterminded" since David Puttnam was handed the reins at Columbia Pictures.\u00c2\u00a0 You don’t take an offbeat producer and put him in charge of the whole enchilada.\u00c2\u00a0 You don’t make Steve Saleen head of General Motors.\u00c2\u00a0 You give the enfant terrible a production deal, his own playground.\u00c2\u00a0 Or you hand him a moribund company and tell him to turn it around.\u00c2\u00a0 You don’t put him in charge of your MAIN DIVISION!<\/p>\n
Rick Rubin at Columbia just insures that BMG will own this partnership.\u00c2\u00a0 What a screw-up.<\/p>\n
I mean he’s gonna start from essentially zero and build a company that can compete with Clive’s?\u00c2\u00a0 Shit, he won’t even be able to compete with JIVE!<\/p>\n
They didn’t give Bob Krasnow Warner Brothers.\u00c2\u00a0 They gave him Elektra Asylum, that had lost a ton of money, that was in jeopardy as a standalone entity.\u00c2\u00a0 The fact that he moved the label to the east coast and fired most of the acts didn’t matter.\u00c2\u00a0 The company was a tear-down.\u00c2\u00a0 The name and a couple of acts was all it had.\u00c2\u00a0 Credit the powers-that-be for recognizing this, they assessed reality and gave a personality a chance, an opportunity to build a unique company, in his own vision.<\/p>\n
If Rick Rubin is so pissed off about Sony’s building, acts and financial structure, why didn’t Rob Stringer give him HIS OWN company, in a building of his choice, with new deals?\u00c2\u00a0 Would that be so hard to do?\u00c2\u00a0 What advantage was gained by putting him in charge of Columbia?\u00c2\u00a0 In what world is an absentee king a good ruler of a failing empire?\u00c2\u00a0 Hiring Rick Rubin is like letting the King of Greece run the U.K. because he’s done a good job in his own country.\u00c2\u00a0 But what about the peculiarities of the U.K?\u00c2\u00a0 What about the fact that people speak a different language?\u00c2\u00a0 The U.K. isn’t Cyprus, it’s a complicated behemoth.\u00c2\u00a0 Rick Rubin is running Columbia like it’s Chrysalis.\u00c2\u00a0 And last I checked, Chrysais NEVER ruled the music business.\u00c2\u00a0 Sold a ton of Tull, then Blondie, Pat Benatar and Huey Lewis, but it wasn’t a FULL SERVICE COMPANY!\u00c2\u00a0 Columbia is a FULL SERVICE COMPANY!<\/p>\n
Columbia Records has pop acts.\u00c2\u00a0 And Tony Bennett.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s got to sell teen pop and hip shit and flavor of the moment ALL AT THE SAME TIME!\u00c2\u00a0 You don’t want someone in the studio, you want someone on the phone, surfing the Web, watching television, in touch with the ZEITGEIST.\u00c2\u00a0 So he can swoop down and execute miracles.\u00c2\u00a0 Columbia is the Yankees.\u00c2\u00a0 Playing 162 games a year, competing for the pennant.\u00c2\u00a0 Not the Segway polo team that gets a lot of press.<\/p>\n
Sure, the music business needs to be reinvented.\u00c2\u00a0 But we don’t need revolution, but EVOLUTION!\u00c2\u00a0 Columbia needs someone to shepherd it from the past to the present to the future.\u00c2\u00a0 So far, Mr. Rubin doesn’t look like that guy.\u00c2\u00a0 Sure, files are going to overtake CDs, but not TODAY!\u00c2\u00a0 So, a company has to sell CDs while PREPARING for the day files take over.\u00c2\u00a0 You can’t be too early, and you can’t be too late.\u00c2\u00a0 Those in charge have been too late.\u00c2\u00a0 Now Rick Rubin is frustrated that the business isn’t functioning as it should in 2013.\u00c2\u00a0 Rick, you’ve got to BRING IT THERE!<\/p>\n
Def Jam stood for something.\u00c2\u00a0 Asylum did so before it.\u00c2\u00a0 And I’m sure you can mention a bunch of albums you could buy by the label.\u00c2\u00a0 But those companies were SMALL, with very little product.\u00c2\u00a0 Columbia’s sole image was as a monolith.\u00c2\u00a0 It stood for nothing sound-wise.\u00c2\u00a0 Nothing wrong with that, it was in a different BUSINESS than Def Jam or Asylum.<\/p>\n
Making Rick Rubin head of Columbia is like trying to solve Chrysler’s problems by turning it into BMW.\u00c2\u00a0 Sure, BMW makes great cars, but it sells NICHE PRODUCTS!\u00c2\u00a0 Chrysler is competing with Toyota, it’s got to offer a broad range of vehicles.\u00c2\u00a0 BMW is a completely different business model.\u00c2\u00a0 Sell high quality at premium prices to the elite.\u00c2\u00a0 If you want to hire Rick Rubin to do this, fine.\u00c2\u00a0 Have him sign the new R.E.M., the new U2, the new Johnny Cash and purvey them with an innovative business model.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe a subscription to THEIR club.\u00c2\u00a0 You pay a lot and you get not only finished product and demos, but a t-shirt and a ticket to the monster gig in the Nevada desert.\u00c2\u00a0 But you can’t sell Kelly Clarkson that way.\u00c2\u00a0 And you can’t sell Kanye that way.\u00c2\u00a0 And those are what’s selling today.<\/p>\n
Columbia needs mainstream product, TODAY!\u00c2\u00a0 Sure, it also needs hip, innovative product.\u00c2\u00a0 It needs it ALL!<\/p>\n
Rick Rubin isn’t on the way to delivering it all, he’s on the road to destroying a major company, turning it into a shadow of itself, at most a marginally successful miniature.\u00c2\u00a0 And I say marginally successful because ever since Rick’s been divorced from Russell Simmons, he’s not made big money as Def American and then American Recordings.\u00c2\u00a0 Great record producer, great finder and signer and developer of raw talent? NO!<\/p>\n
So now the label’s been dismantled.\u00c2\u00a0 They’re starting over close to ground zero.\u00c2\u00a0 You’d be better off with Donnie Ienner.\u00c2\u00a0 WHOOPS, they fired Donnie.\u00c2\u00a0 He lost out in a power struggle.<\/p>\n
If\u00c2\u00a0 you think Rick Rubin can beat the Germans\/Clive at their own game, you’re just not a student of history.<\/p>\n
If Rob Stringer wasn’t Howard’s brother, he’d be looking for a new job soon.\u00c2\u00a0 This idea was good dinner table fodder, but giving Rick Rubin Columbia was pure folly.<\/p>\n
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In\u00c2\u00a0 retrospect, hiring Rick Rubin to run Big Red was a massive mistake. Yup, Rick’s running it.\u00c2\u00a0 From a distance.\u00c2\u00a0 He doesn’t go to the office, he doesn’t communicate, he dropped a ton of acts, there’s a wild cabal running the label and the worker bees have no clue what’s going on. How did this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-fb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=941"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}