ChasNote

From WSJ, reg required. Especially since I’m posting this three weeks after the Journal ran the story!

My pal and neighbor Jeff Daniel, CEO of Rock River, put together an excellent and innovative marketing concept for Chrysler and Ford: Podcast music programs with sponsor messages mingled in among the songs. Jeff compares the concept to the King Biscuit Flour Hour, the commercial-free block of classic rock that ran on radio stations in the 1970s and 80s, but the Rock River version is portable as an MP3 podcast. And — this is the new and noteworthy part — a major music label (Sony BMG) actually consented to let Rock River, Chrysler and Ford distribute their music as DRM-free MP3 files.

“Chrysler and Ford pay Sony BMG Music Entertainment — the joint venture of Sony Corp. and Germany’s Bertelsmann AG — a flat fee, which the companies decline to disclose, for the right to distribute the podcasts for a year, regardless of how many or how few copies are downloaded. Users can keep the programs on their personal computers or MP3 players indefinitely.”

In other words, Chrysler and Ford teamed up with Rock River to make first-rate, digital anthology albums (Rock River also makes the CDs for Pottery Barn and other retailers) that will be added to listeners’ music drives as a permanent addition to the playlist, singing the Chrysler and Ford jingles for ever more.