GlitchNYC

Cruxy launches at Video 2.0 meetup, and why you should care.

August 31st, 2006

Continuing my round-up of the speakers at last night’s Video 2.0 meetup, Cruxy presented second, and were touted as the first ever official launch at a one of our events.

Cruxy allows people to upload any type of digital content and then offer it for sale. The guys up on stage were wonderfully anti-DRM and very hip to Creative Commons (literally wearing the t-shirt!). Even though this was the Video meetup, they were also quick to show that although you could sell your indie movie using their service, you could also sell PDFs, 3dsmax files, mp3s, and even group content items into “albums”.

Working to be completely straight with their content producers, they’re incredibly transparent about their fee structure. When you offer an item for sale, you enter your price, and they tell you how much goes to them, and how much goes to paypal right there on the page. My first thought was “CD baby, but for downloads”, and I’ve been waiting for years for this to show up! I’m glad to see if finally coming to fruition, especially from a bunch of guys who are independent themselves and really “get it.” I got a chance to talk with Nathan a bit afterwards, and they seemed much more excited about helping empower content creators than about making a buck.

They went on to show all the ways that they’re giving people to embed their sales engine, so that you don’t have to point people to your cruxy page, you can simply use your existing website, blog, or myspace page to generate sales. In the same way that you can embed youtube videos on your blog, you can drop in their sales widget and people can preview and buy your content right there using a credit card or paypal account. Bands can even use their tool to create an replacement music player for myspace that allows sales.

It looks extremely cool, and they’ve certainly got a clear revenue model. The final piece of their puzzle is that promoters (including podcasters, which made my ears perk up) will also be able to establish relationships with content creators and potentially get a cut of any sale through they system that they generate.

As for my opinion, well, let’s just say I’ll be recommending Cruxy to many of the bands we work with on The Alternative Music Show. If you’re an artist struggling with how to sell your content online, you owe it to yourself to check Cruxy out.