It took about a week to go from rumor to reality. Late last week we heard the first strong rumblings of RIM’s music offering, BBM Music. On Monday I laid out the gist, and decided that RIM needed an expert marketing plan to sell this. It sounded like a good idea, but it runs counter to the offers we’re used to seeing. That is, even though most people don’t take advantage of unlimited music plans, they love the idea of having access to unlimited music. How, then, does RIM sell a service that allows users access to only 50 songs? We’re about to find out. They officially announced the service this week and have already started a closed beta. Here’s what you can expect. 
In terms of how it will work, the rumors were basically spot on. You pay $5 per month and get access to 50 songs. You can play these only on your BlackBerry smartphone or PlayBook, though you can download them to listen offline. (In fact, this is probably preferred.) What opens up this service is your BBM contact list. If one of your friends signs up, you have access to her 50 songs as well. That turns it into something of a music social network for BlackBerry users. As you can see in the screenshot to the right, that’s exactly what RIM is going for here. The product itself, as mentioned, is in closed beta. I’ll hopefully have a review of that next week. But for now it’s probably best to stay away from that. Even in the private beta it will be tough to gauge, because it won’t be open to entire contact lists. And really, that’s the most important part. The social networking aspect of it is a nice little touch. Again, it’s going to be tough to gauge the real effects until we get a widespread rollout — even in the beta we won’t get the full experience. But if you can see the people your friends start sharing with, that can expand your BBM network, which therefore extends your music network. That is, you can discover new people through music. That’s a favorite past time for many of us, meeting people at concerts and record stores. With the latter falling by the wayside, this is one way to simulate that experience. In terms of marketing, while there is some leg work to do, the product does in many ways market itself. When you sign up for BBM Music, you want to get as many of your friends on board as well. More friends means more music, after all. The challenge RIM faces is getting the ball rolling. Once they develop that critical mass, it should spread on its own. This is always the most difficult part for any service that requires many users in order to be effective. How do you get those first thousand, hundred thousand, million? Once you get them, they do most of the legwork for you. I’m definitely stoked at the potential of BBM Music. RIM could have created a storage locker service, in the mold of Google Music, or it could have offered a download center a la iTunes. But it chose to go in a different and certainly riskier direction. The potential is absolutely there. Now all RIM needs is to convince the first X number of users to sign up and get their friends to do the same. Once it hits a certain point, this could blow up. You can check out a quick BBM Music screenshot library: Photo 1 | Photo 2 | Photo 3 | Photo 4
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