Robbie Mitchell's dashboard

Hi Nikana,

I'm sorry to hear of your frustration. It's predictably disappointing when something that was free is no longer free, but I hope I can put this in context a bit.

We are not a grant-funded institution; we are a startup, and selling our innovative educational music is the primary way we sustain ourselves as a company, including full-time customer support and payments to our artists to make top-level music for students. If we cannot actually sell the music, we cannot make any more, and if we only ran a free website, we would eventually have to stop completely. That isn't good for anyone, including students. Our goal is to make a product worth paying for.

That said, we offered the original version of our songs for free on our website for a long time, but there were some challenges, including the fact that students never heard the alternate versions of the songs (there are at least three for every song, which come with the retail versions), and the imeem players we used for a long time were increasingly blocked by school firewalls.

To get around these problems and the logistics of having teachers buy CDs and downloads individually, we spent this summer working on a solution. The result is RRR.fm, an unlimited, on-demand streaming service for schools. When schools sign up, teachers get individual accounts and access to our entire library, which they can use to play songs in class and create playlists for students. Even better, students also get 24/7 access to the songs via computer, so it's no longer limited to playing in class. Our introductory priciing is just $1 per student per year--an incredibly aggressive price that we hope makes it attractive to schools and school districts.

We have more info on RRR.fm here: http://www.educationalrap.com/rrrfm

To be clear: this is not a hobby for us, it is a full-time endeavor with numerous people working hard to make quality educational supplements for teachers and students. Despite the nominal cost (either for an individual or a school), I hope it's something worth using--and recommending to others. I think your students will agree.

Best,

Robbie Mitchell
Managing Director
Rhythm, Rhyme, Results
617.674.7524
robbie@educationalrap.com

Hi Wendi,

Thanks for the suggestion! What specific topics are you looking for? And what state are you in? An album related to world history is near the top of our production road map.

Robbie

"Astronomy is hot..."!

Hi Michelle, I just watched some of your videos on YouTube. It's incredible that you write and perform these for your students; they have no idea how lucky they are!

Could you send me an email? We are brewing up some ideas that might be able to combine our work.

Robbie

Hi Kimberly,

I'm going through our old GS log and did not realize you had never received an anwer to this (unless it was over email). We highly encourage use of our music to create student videos and other fun media. All we ask is that the resulting video be posted on something public, such as YouTube or Teacher Tube, and that you notify us so we can check it out! We may even feature it on our website.

Thanks!

Robbie

Cleaning up our old GS log. Solved by user (unrelated to IE7).

Cleaning up our old GS log. This appears to have been solved by the user.

Cleaning up our old GS log. This was fixed.

Bryan, thanks so much! We actually have an office in Brooklyn and I would be happy to talk to you and your school in person. Email me and we can talk more: robbie@educationalrap.com

Hi Chris, thanks for writing and for your purchase! The individual music sales are not meant for distribution to entire schools by default, but we can create a license for the whole school so you can distribute to everyone. We can also help with distribution to everyone if that's a challenge. Could you email me so we can talk about that? robbie@educationalrap.com

We're also developing a streaming music service that will solve this exact problem, enabling teachers and students to access the library via computer 24/7. I can also tell you more about that if you're interested in becoming a beta tester!

Hi Mary, sorry about that! I looked up your order and emailed you another copy of the Science lyrics PDF.

We don't normally conduct workshops, as we operate with a small team and wide network of artists who spend the majority of their time producing the music. We did, however, do a series of workshops for the Boston Public Schools involving some of our artists and a team of people to help middle school students write and record their own rap song about summer; that was a huge hit.

At any rate, anything is possible if we can get the right people together. Feel free to email us directly if you have a proposal!