So what happens after you spend $20M+, build a 1.5M song database, cut hundreds of deals with the labels for legal downloading - creating a special subscription deal for college students at $3 a month?

Well not much - if your venture backed and you need 10’s of millions of college students to make a profit - and most of them are already on Facebook and MySpace.

So banking on the ”radical (but just) departure” school of thought - one of our clients - Ruckus Networks has chosen to just blow off the $3 a month all together, and deficit finance that $3 with ads and other forms of revenue generation.

Before this change, Ruckus had to go out and either negotiate deals with the entire college or university (they closed about 35+ of these deals) or offer their service to students - on a person by person basis.  They don’t compete with the major downloading players - as their prices are less than 1/3rd what the ‘normal’ downloaders have to pay.

The music downloading business is messy, not profitable and dominated by the 800lb gorilla from Cupertino.  So Ruckus has the balls to try something new and give college students a great deal along the way.  I’ve been trying to get them to include open APIs into their system and we have lots of other coolio new features to develop - but this is the ‘headline’ grabber they’ve been hoping for.

FREE LEGAL MUSIC DOWNLOADS - courtesy of your friends at Ruckus Networks.

I guess the record labels and publishers feel that this money is free money - and that these kids would just go steal the music anyway.  Well I don’t really mean steal (I can just feel the wrath of Cory Doctorow towering over my virtual sholder.) 

I meant to say ‘digitally appropriate’ as much music as they wish, thereby bringing the threat of lawsuit from the RIAA upon them.

Ruckus focuses on college students - as they’re high influencers, trend setters and they could cut deals with the labels - which would not be possible for normal people.

BTW this deal is good for college students - whether you live on or off campus - and in fact anyone with an .edu mail account.

As some of you may know, I don’t do endorsements, wear company logos on my t-shirts or play that game - unless the client is paying me.

So here I am wearing a Ruckus t-shirt.

It also helps to have a XXXL for me.

So congrats to the folks at Ruckus.

Right on!

 

 

 

 

 

 

This entry was posted on Monday, February 13th, 2006 at 9:29 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.