The launch playbook. Draft material. Shared by invitation only.
The legal framework is in motion. What follows is the shape of the launch — a two-city, six-week arc that could turn the Rhapsody release into a participatory cultural moment, and Join the Band into the platform your audience never knew they were waiting for.
A proposal offered with respect. Not a schedule, not a timeline, not a request. This is one possible shape of a launch we'd be honored to build alongside you — contingent entirely on your blessing, your release plans for Rhapsody, and your creative timing.
On April 7 and again on April 15, you and your team gave us more than your time — you gave us feedback worth building around. What follows in this document is shaped by three principles that came directly out of those conversations. Everything else is logistics.
Los Angeles could light the fuse. New York could strike the match. The six weeks between are where the campaign lives — a window long enough to build a movement, short enough to feel like a countdown. If Rhapsody lands anywhere near the Blue Note Jazz Festival weekend, this is the arc that makes the most of it.
LA is not the launch. It is the ignition.
The content team is already in town. Management is already in town. The group is on stage twice a night for four consecutive nights. We use the window to capture the raw material that powers the next six weeks of campaign — so that by the time June arrives, the audience has already lived inside the story.
No masterclass shoot required here. That can happen in a dedicated session later. What LA needs to produce is the emotional, promotional, and messaging fuel the campaign will run on.
While the legal framework buttons up, both sides build in parallel. Nothing waits. Every day between May 4 and June 18 is working toward the same moment.
Brands don't sell to musicians. Musicians sell to musicians. The ambassador program turns 100 of the most engaged superfans in the Take 6 community into the front-line force for launch day.
That principle applies to ambassadors too. Trust transfer. Recommendations from real fans inside the Take 6 community carry weight paid ads never can. A post from a friend who sings in a community choir, who has been quoting Spread Love lyrics for twenty years, converts at a rate paid social simply cannot match.
Content multiplication. Each ambassador produces three to five original pieces and reshares official content several times a week. That's 300 to 500 original pieces of content and nearly 2,000 reshares across six weeks — produced at zero marginal cost.
Reach amplification. The average engaged superfan has between 1,000 and 5,000 followers in their own social graph. 100 ambassadors reach somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 people we could not otherwise touch — and they reach them with implicit endorsement built in.
Community seeding. The ambassador program turns the launch into something the community does together, not something done to them. That cultural difference is what makes Day One feel like a movement instead of a product release.
Application opens May 4. Closes May 15. Approvals out by May 20. Criteria: active Take 6 engagement, a minimum social following of 500, demonstrated content production capability, and a short video answering "why Take 6 changed me." No bots, no influencer farms, no padding. Real people with real voices inside the real community.
A tiered leaderboard runs from May 21 through June 1, with a launch-week bonus sprint June 15–21 to keep the pool active through conversion day. Rewards are structured so the top producer earns a story worth telling — and everyone who contributes earns meaningful founding-member access.
Take 6 performs. The platform opens. The press breaks.
Six weeks of anticipation convert in two nights.
The moment the group takes the stage on June 19, the platform goes live. Every ambassador activates the post they've been waiting to publish. QR codes appear on screen between sets. The embargo lifts. A coordinated wave of jazz and music press runs stories the same morning.
The rooms themselves are the ignition. Two nights, four shows inside the Blue Note Jazz Festival — the most devoted Take 6 audience in the country physically present at the conversion moment. They don't just witness the launch. They are the launch.
The group references the platform mid-set. A moment woven into the performance — not a commercial break.
QR codes on every table. Between-set projection. Wait staff trained to point guests to the signup flow. Scanning becomes part of the show.
The first Rhapsody track drops inside the platform that night. Founding members hear it before the DSPs.
DownBeat, JAZZIZ, All About Jazz, Billboard, and the music press that has covered Take 6 for three decades run coordinated pieces. The platform wakes up with the jazz world's full attention.
Day one isn't one channel pulling weight. It's four — each engineered to convert a different slice of the Take 6 audience at its natural moment of commitment. The math works because they overlap, reinforce, and compound.
Built over 45 days. Converted in 48 hours. Every piece of content produced between May 4 and June 18 funnels toward one outcome: a founding-member waitlist of 5,000+ names, armed with email and SMS, warmed by 30 days of the Come Back Series.
Why it converts at 30%:
Take 6's owned audience is already built. 61,600 on Instagram. 99,000 on Facebook, with a 6,100-member private superfan group. 1.3M lifetime YouTube views. Combined reach conservatively sits above 200,000.
Activation plan — launch week:
At a 1% conversion on reachable audience, the social base alone contributes materially — with substantial overlap into the waitlist and ambassador funnels.
Two nights. Four shows. Roughly 1,000 total attendees. Every single person in those rooms has already self-identified as a superfan — they bought a ticket, on launch weekend, at the Blue Note Jazz Festival.
In-room conversion mechanics:
A 40% in-room conversion is not aggressive for an audience that has already bought a ticket. It's what happens when conversion friction is nearly zero and the moment is shared.
The embargo lifts the morning of June 19. DownBeat, JAZZIZ, All About Jazz, Billboard, and the broader jazz press land coordinated stories. The relationships are real — Take 6 has won DownBeat's Best Jazz Vocal Group in the Reader's and Critic's Poll for seven consecutive years. Ambassador content compounds organically. The platform wakes up with the jazz world's full attention already in market.
Press coverage doesn't just deliver raw signups — it validates every conversion already in motion. It's the proof point that closes hesitant waitlist members, social followers on the fence, and live attendees who want to tell their friends they were in the room when it happened.
The pathways overlap intentionally. An ambassador is often also on the waitlist, also in the room, also a social follower. Each pathway reinforces the others — the waitlist converts because the social has warmed them, the rooms convert because the ambassadors are present, the press amplifies because the moment is already happening. The model is not additive. It is compound.
The most reasonable concern about launching any new platform is that it will feel like a building with empty rooms. On June 19, it won't. This is what a founding member sees the moment they sign in.
When a founding member signs in at 8:01pm ET on June 19, this is what's waiting for them. Not a dashboard. Not a roadmap. A finished platform with music to play, a show to watch, a calendar to anticipate, and a community to join. The platform opens finished.
3,000 founding members on day one. $100,000 in launch-day revenue. A simple offer, a physical artifact they can hold, and math that stands up on its own.
One membership. $30 a month. Platform access, the first Rhapsody single, the catalog starter, the masterclass, the welcome, and a physical founding-member merch bundle shipped to every new subscriber. That's the offer. No tier charts, no "which level should I pick" friction.
For members ready to commit up front, we offer one step-up: $199 for the full year — a 45% discount on annual pricing, paired with a premium merch bundle. That's it. Two doors, same universe.
The merch is not a gift-with-purchase. It's the proof of membership. Every founding member receives a physical bundle in the mail within seven days of signup. When 3,000 people post their "my Join the Band box arrived" moment across social, a second wave begins — not paid for, not orchestrated, just founders showing each other what they joined.
Landed cost per bundle: roughly $15 for Monthly, $25 for Annual. Factored into the margin model below. The branded physical artifact is what turns a SaaS subscription into a movement people can wear.
The $100,000 commitment is intentionally conservative. If only 2,000 Monthly and 300 Annual convert, the day-one collection still clears $119,700. The realistic target case sits at $174,500. Stretch case — with stronger ambassador conversion into Annual — pushes past $200,000.
Day-One MRR. The 2,500 Monthly members lock in $75,000 in monthly recurring revenue from day one — an annualized run-rate of $900,000 before a single member stepped up, before a single ad was run, and before the second founding artist conversation even began.
~100 ambassadors activating circles. A 5,000-person waitlist converting at 30%. Two nights of Blue Note rooms doing what rooms like those always do.
The committed floor. Realistic target sits at $174,500. MRR lands at $75,000 from day one.
Day One opens the door. What happens in the six months after is where the platform earns its long-term shape — and where the Rhapsody release compounds into a year-end story that finally matches the music.
Three weeks after Day One, the platform launches its first public challenge — and this is where the core mechanic becomes visible to the world beyond the founding-member wall.
One isolated stem from the Spread Love Challenge recording goes up as a free download, captured in exchange for name, email, and SMS. Fans record their part — voice or instrument — and submit within a 30-day window. Community voting runs alongside a judging panel to separate signal from noise.
Every submission is a piece of free marketing. Every share of a submission is a second wave. The challenge turns the platform's core mechanic — fans singing with the group, not just along — into a public, sharable, joyful cultural moment.
Single 1 dropped at launch on June 19, platform-exclusive for two weeks before DSP release. Single 2 follows six weeks later on the same structure — exclusive early, then wide.
The full album releases with a proposed 21-day platform-exclusive window before wide DSP distribution. The stems stay permanent platform exclusive — available nowhere else, ever. That is the subscription's center of gravity through the summer and beyond.
The rollout is not a concession to distributors. It is the reason to subscribe — and the reason members stay.
The projection isn't a moonshot. It's a defensible line drawn from Day One through a six-month compound curve — Rhapsody drip, ambassador retention, word-of-mouth through the song challenge, and a founding cohort that brings their own circles in.
This is the number that matters most for the long play. Ed's instinct was right — prove the model with Take 6, get past 200 to 300 subscribers and then past several thousand, and the next artists come to us. At $2M ARR and a proven cohort of engaged, paying musicians, the conversations about a second founding artist aren't conversations we initiate. They're conversations that find us.
Not your capital. Not more time than the Blue Note window requires. What we're asking for is your blessing on the shape of this launch, your name attached to its authorship, and — when the time eventually comes — the introductions only you can make.
That last part is the real contribution. The catalog and the music are the art. The Blue Note window is the moment. But the one thing no amount of capital can buy is the willingness of a group with your standing in jazz to introduce us to the artists you've known for decades — when the time is right, and not a day before. Everything below is logistics.
Daniel Schacht and Steven Lee are already working through the founding partner agreement, Terms of Use, AI and NIL protection, non-cash asset valuation, and dissolution provisions — the four areas Dana raised on April 15. We'd like your counsel engaged directly with Daniel so everything is buttoned up and behind us before the end of May.
Short, intentional content windows across the April 30 to May 3 run. Promo shoots, group-to-camera moments, behind-the-scenes access. We walk away from four days with six weeks of campaign fuel — and no masterclass shoot required during the run itself.
Which Rhapsody single drops first. Which re-recordings anchor the opening catalog. What the welcome from the group looks like. All ready for your review and built only on your green light.
The music you have been making for thirty-five years has always been ahead of its time.
Rhapsody should launch into something that finally matches it.
Let's build this moment
together.