Rick Rubin Claims the iPod Is Dead

… So what's the 3.0 model? Believe it or not, Rick Rubin knows.

When I first saw the headline for Rick Rubin's comments, I'm pretty sure I laughed out loud and rolled my eyes. But Rubin isn't someone to be scoffed at in the music industry; after all, this is a man who foresaw the popularity of hip-hop and rap. There's a reason an artist like the late Johnny Cash would turn to Rubin for a career boost; the man knows how to get on the next wave from the very first hint of a swell.

The more you look at what Rubin is saying, the more you see that the man has an uncanny instinct for what's coming; when he says the iPod is dead, he's really talking about how the Semantic Web is going to impact consumers and how they want music. Right now we have tons of sites and services all over the map for getting what we want and sharing it with others. There's iTunes for buying and reviewing and sharing playlists, along with Last.fm and Mog for sharing those playlists and finding new music as well as apps available on MySpace for playing music and iLike on Facebook for comparing your music and hooking up for concerts. And it's still limited to selections you've purchased and placed in each app or on each device.

What Rick is suggesting is a much more user-intuitive way of accessing music, and it's one that's been suggested before, but Steve Jobs doesn't think users want: a subscription service. Fred Wilson talked about this back in January: users now discover music differently, and it makes sense that they want to listen to it differently. Satellite radio provides a better range than commercial radio, but it's still not on demand, nor tailored exactly to what individual users want to listen to.

What Rubin is describing is a subscription service tailored to individuals; for a monthly fee, you can still select your own music, but it would be available any place that you are; via the car, at home, at the office, on a portable device, but all via a central database. No more porting selected music from your collection to your Nano and then plugging it in to an FM transmitter to listen to it in the car. Think of it as an iTunes selection model for a set monthly price available on the same terms as your satellite radio. Adaptable to your changing tastes (are you really listening to Foreigner's 4 enough anymore to warrant owning it?) while still letting you take your trips down nostalgia lane, this new model would provide users with a tailored listening experience that adapts to their changing needs and tastes. Imagine being able to subscribe to the service, and then customize your listening by environment or time of day.

I think Rubin is really onto something when he says, “Either all the record companies will get together or the industry will fall apart and someone like Microsoft will come in and buy one of the companies at wholesale and do what needs to be done.” You'd think that Apple would want to be that company.