rVibe Blog

Well - we did it - we launched a new piece of the rVibe family - “rVibe Anywhere”.  Pretty cool - you can leave rVibe running on your computer at home and stream any of your tracks to anywhere else by logging on to www.rvibe.com.  Here’s the press release:

Bethlehem, PA - November 14th, 2007 - rVibe.com, a community based online music service announced today that it has launched “rVibe Anywhere”. In addition to offering over 1 million legal downloads for sale, “rVibe Anywhere” allows members to stream all of their own personal tracks as well as their friends’ tracks from any web browser, absolutely free.

“We’re really excited about rVibe Anywhere.” says Founder and CEO, Dr. Braydon Johnson-McCormick, “With no required uploading, risky legal issues or additional cost, rVibe Anywhere is the best way to enjoy your music and the rVibe network when you’re away from home. And since it’s integrated into the service, there’s no additional work to use it.”

In addition to downloading tracks, making recommendations, making friends and getting rewards, Members can embed playlists in their personal blogs and websites, tag their tracks, and burn and/or rip songs from their library.

rVibe is an installable, desktop application available free for Windows. rVibe Anywhere is a web browser companion service to rVibe.

About rVibe:
rVibe is a community based music download and streaming service where members make recommendations and get rewards when other members download music from them. It offers users the best in music discovery, community and downloads for consumers as well provides the means for artists to register music and get paid, and for advertisers to effectively deliver highly targeted ad placements. For more information, please visit http://www.rvibe.com.

Copyright, 2007, rVibe, LLC

There continues to be much discussion over whether people want own their music or rent it. Whether music should “stay in the cloud” or get downloaded onto a device for local playback.  The people on the rent side also are typically also on the cloud side and their rationale is that when bandwidth prices come down and super high speed connectivity is ubiquitous then people won’t need storage based devices to house their tunes. And that people will be willing to rent/subscribe to services that allow access to all music - a kind of all you can eat thing.

In my view, technically it’s a nice idea, but not feasible; at least not for the next 5+ years. Bandwidth is too expensive, slow, and the penetration is not there. But there is actually a more fundamental problem - people want to own their music.

There tends to be a much stronger emotional tie to music that any other digital art form and for that reason alone, rental is not enough. People want it to be theirs - and when something is owned, they want to use it the way they want.  Rental or subscriptions are the opposite of that. Granted this is really a perception issue: people don’t really own their music, and the files are not really a physical representation of a non-physical thing, but none-the-less, people believe they own their music. To that end, I don’t think that rental/subscription services are the end all of music delivery. 

And further, I think that until bandwidth is fast enough to drive the perception of locally experienced files, then music will need both a storage device that is local to give that sense of ownership and experience.

You need really look no further than the market today to know that what I stipulate is true.  The dominant music distribution services - iTunes, eMusic, Amazon are download services where you buy your music and are unencumbered by subscription. The dominant form of experiencing digital music is from the local device - MP3 player or local computer.  Even things like Verizon VCast are a la carte purchase and download to device services. The bandwidth is not there and the desire for subscription is not there.   And even the new iPhone or iPod touch are download and local environments.

And generally, right now bandwidth and storage is just too expensive and the margins on music are just too thin to really make money. That’s why you see these orthogonal marketing relationships like Wendy’s and Rhapsody start to crop up. Odd at best.

Hence the reason we’re building rVibe as an a la carte download service with a local management function and peer-to-pere delivery. That’s why it’s not just another streaming website for playlists and social networking.  People use their music locally, people buy music and download it and use it and we want to keep operation costs low.

We made rVibe social music download software, we didn’t make a streaming, subscription website like so many others.

Has this ever happened to you?  You’re shuffling through the thousands of songs on your iPod and you honestly can not stand any of them.  Songs that you’ve heard countless times are just boring to you now and you need something new and different to listen to.

 One great thing about rVibe is that you can listen to any one of your friends’ “radio stations.”  A friend’s radio station is essentially every song they have on their musical library.  This is a great way to learn about all of the music that’s not on your iPod (and that you’re not entirely sick of yet!).  My goal is to use my friends radio stations and download 10 new songs a day so that i’m never bored and never sick of all the music on my iPod again!

-Seth

According to Mashable, ad:tech NYC has revealed that advertisers want to be on new media. By new media they mean things like Facebook, MySpace and YouTube.  And that really means social networking and user generated content.  And further, what that really means is highly targeted ads.

Good thing that rVibe also offers highly targeted ad delivery based on user data.  Right along with Facebook and MySpace.  The difference here is that we’re building our data collection around what an advertiser wants to see, and making it transparent to the user.  Better data, better results.

-Braydon

While I was at work, a colleague of mine asked me if I am a big fan of music and if so, do i need a good way of accessing it online etc etc…  So, he told me about this thing that his girlfriend has been designing as part of her job as a marketing something or other…it’s called jango.com; the concept is myspace meets satellite radio.  I realize it is not the same thing that rvibe is, but i definitely thought it was worth mentioning as another facet of the competition.  I joined it and have been putzing around with it a bit over the last 12 hrs or so…  If anyone wants to check it out let me know and i will invite you to join(it’s in beta format so the number of members is limited so that the network doesn’t clog).  These are the types of things that should definitely be kept on the radar, not just to beware of, but to learn from and find new possible angles from which to approach the end goal.