Arne Lucas, Consultant, Illiance Creative Group
Formerly the Director of Mobile Marketing at INgrooves, Arne has spent over half his life in the music industry. His first experience was in the early ‘90s as an artist with the San Francisco-based Soul / R&B vocal group IF. During this time he realized he felt more comfortable behind the scenes, and went on to perfect his skills as a recording engineer. By the mid ‘90s he was chief recording engineer for a full service recording studio located in San Francisco’s Mission District and was working as an executive assistant to the President of a local Bay Area label – Classified Records – which was picked up by Tommy Boy in the late ‘90s.
At the time, the Bay Area music scene was thriving but Arne felt that there was more to accomplish. By now he excelled at the label, getting his hands into everything from A&R duties, to engineering, physical retail distribution and licensing. He was soon hired on full time and thrived at the label. Arne took to the business of music, expanding his knowledge of publishing, licensing and contract negotiations. He moved on to assist in a new music venture for the New York City start-up A Media, which focused on the Asian American entertainment industry.
He was then approached a few years later by his mentor at Classified to take on a Music Supervisor position for 360 Media Group. 360 Media’s flagship product was a DVD series called 360 Video Magazine, a quarterly video magazine that specialized in the import car scene, extreme sports, music and entertainment. Its first mainstream release “Hard Drive” was certified gold and distributed at major retail chains such as Best Buy, Wal-Mart and Target as well as hundreds of smaller retail stores worldwide. After a number of years and over 20 releases under his belt at 360, the DVD market was on a decline so Arne moved into a new career.
In 2003, he accepted a Product Manager position with Hudson Entertainment Inc. who had just acquired the license to The Source Magazine. This was his first experience in the wireless entertainment industry and he hasn’t looked back since. He was integral to bringing what many say was the “Bible of Hip Hop” for over 20 years – The Source Magazine – to mobile. The Source Mobile Channel was one of the only ringtone applications on deck that strictly distributed Hip-Hop/Urban ringtones – this was during the lucrative “polyphonic” era of the ringtone and well before carrier white label mastertone stores such as the ones currently available on Verizon, Sprint, AT&T etc. He eventually moved to a more video game-centric position in mobile as an Account Manager with Namco Networks – working directly with carriers to launch the classic game catalog for mobile from the legendary video game giant. It was here where he learned the intricacies of the carrier world. After close to 2 years peddling mobile video games he decided to get back into the music business at INgrooves where he served as Director of Mobile Marketing for 4 years, overseeing the mobile business for the digital label.