Exclusive: rVibe to launch legal p2p music sharing without DRM
By Vivek | March 15th, 2007 at 01:24 pm ET
rVibe will be launching the first legal p2p based music sharing platform next month. rVibe has partnered with CDBaby to deliver its 550k tracks in DRM free mp3 format and is already working with other major music labels. Based out of Bethelehem, PA, rVibe was founded by Braydon Johnson-McCormick who did his PhD in music from Boston University and later worked in various Fortune 50 companies including Fidelity. rVibe and its team of 8 is supported by angel funding from Ben Franklin and few private investors.
The music sharing platform goes into private beta mode tomorrow, will go through couple of rounds of testing and ready for public release in April. Users will be able to buy songs for 99 cents that will be delivered through the p2p based network keeping the distribution cost down for the rVibe. Songs will be delivered in the near CD quality 320 kbps format instead of the standard 192 kbps offered by most of the other networks.
Besides the DRM+mp3 angle, rVibe service has built the service with major focus on social networking and recommendations that will easily set it apart from the likes of Apple, eMusic, Rhapsody, and in fact set it to compete with Last.fm at some level. However the feature that will put rVibe ahead of Last.fm is the fact that rVibe recommendation system also has a rewards angle built into it. For each song purchased by the users which was recommended by you, you will get 5 cents. Not a big return still better than getting nothing. Imagine if they integrate a metaverse into the service like SL to make the points interoperable. Lot of startups have their eyes on building such a recommendation-rewards based system that is complex to build. Once in place it will drive recommendations to a much higher and relevant level and in turn unlock millions of dollars of additional revenues for music companies. As it stands right now, rVibe seems to have beaten all of them to the finish line.
As for device compatibility, music files from rVibe will work on Sansa, iRiver and other common mp3 players, while they are also working on drivers to get them to play on iPod.
Links:
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