Just over two months ago I had the incredible fortune of being named Topspin’s CEO. But Topspin’s story starts long before that. The seeds of Topspin date back seven years to founders Peter Gotcher (Digidesign) and Shamal Ranasinghe (Real Networks, Musicmatch, Yahoo! Music) discussing the future of music marketing. They rightly sat on their idea for many years (knowing “being early is the same as being wrong” in the startup world) but finally took it off ice and threw it on the grill one year ago this month. Since then Topspin has been growing an all-star team and quietly building three products which will come to form a marketing software platform helping artists (and their business partners) build their businesses and their brands. Today we’re unveiling the modest beginnings of one of those three products (via this Web site and an article in Billboard Magazine) and having a party down in Venice, CA to celebrate the company’s first year (if you didn’t receive your invite but would like to come, please mail us and we’ll see if we can fit you in).
Topspin is founded on the principle that while costs of production and distribution in the music industry are dropping, unlimited choice for consumers only increases the importance of efficient marketing. Marketing means both connecting and cultivating relationships with your existing fans (much of what Seth Godin describes as “Permission Marketing” applies) as well as discovering new fans. Topspin is building software tools to help artists market efficiently.
But we are not a “marketing services” company. Topspin is a technology company loaded with experienced software developers in Santa Monica and San Francisco and our aim is to be the platform of choice for many of the great marketing services companies already in existence. If you are such a company, please drop us a line so we can talk about how we might work together.
Also, Topspin does not have a consumer-facing brand. We’re about helping artists build *their* brand, not trying to pollute the space with one of our own.
Eventually we’ll be opening up the Topspin platform to anyone who would like to make a living from their art. But for starters we’re working with a few select artists, labels, and managers who get it, are fun to work with, give us great feedback, and have been patient and supportive as we build the features they need to be successful. Look for some very fun and exciting projects and releases from Topspin-powered artists and labels this summer and fall; part of the reason for coming out of stealth mode is so we can talk about these experiments as they happen. Subscribe to this blog to be kept in-the-know.
We’ve worked with about ten artists in the past year. Here are three I think you should go try right now:
Jubilee is Aaron North (Icarus Line, NIN, Buddyhead) and Mike Shuman (Queens of the Stone Age, Wires On Fire). They recorded a (GREAT) four-song EP earlier this year and are just putting a finished album in the can now. It’s a great, rock record, KROQ-ready. But Jubilee took an interesting approach. Instead of shopping a deal they decided to go direct to fans and use the money they made to fund the rest of the record. They shopped the record around a bit (and had interest from traditional labels) but decided to stay independent, sell on their own using the Topspin platform, and license the album internationally to territories they plan to tour in (Australia and Japan, for starters).
The Topspin platform is flexible in terms of how an artist wants to structure their offer, but the Jubilee guys went with a hybrid: four songs a la carte at $0.99 each, the whole EP for $3, or “our entire recorded output for the year” for $20. Amazingly, more than 60% of their customers are taking the $20 option. Considering Jubilee is a band who has never released an album before, this was surprising and encouraging to us.
Jubilee have become big Topspin fans and you’ll see them release another EP via Topspin in another week (and at our party tonight, too). Get over to Jubilee.la and buy the $20 package now and you’ll not only receive a colored 7-inch vinyl record, but be the first to know when the new music drops.
Josh Rouse is an incredible singer-songwriter who used to record for Rykodisc but has since gone independent, releasing his “Bedroom Classics” records via his Web site. He recently started a new subscription service on his site, JoshRouse.com, where you can download the latest Bedroom Classics release a la carte or as an album, or you can subscribe and get *everything* he releases on the site, which just in the past month is 40 songs on five albums. He started with a limited edition version at $100, which comes with signed and numbered CDs, but those are gone and the subscription is now just $30.
The Dandy Warhols recently left Capitol Records after a string of masterpieces, none of which sold to the label’s liking but all of which achieved cult status. For their new record they decided to reward their biggest fans first by offering a subscription package including: the new album months before it hits stores, a silkscreened poster and the physical CD in your home mailbox, and every b-side as it’s released in your email box for $35. The record is fantastic and you can preview the whole thing on their site for free. Try, buy, enjoy.
Since much of the value Topspin adds is in the artist control panel which is behind the scenes, these three examples show only the very tip of the proverbial Topspin iceberg. The visual design for each of these is done by the artist, Topspin is the enabling platform underneath. And what you can’t see, the back office where the artist manages pricing, catalog, metadata, fans, and most importantly marketing campaigns and analytics, is our bread and butter.
Just to show you Topspin can scale to large consumer demand, I’ll give away a little secret: we pitched in and offered up our content delivery network to Nine Inch Nails for the Ghosts release and the first few weeks of The Slip. While we had nothing to do with the front-end of those (incredible, inspiring, historic) promotions, we stepped in to help after their first couple of days of downtime and subsequently when you downloaded the albums they were coming from our servers and we moved hundreds of terabytes of data for them. It was an honor to be involved, even tangentially. On a related note, I wish Girl Talk would have used us for his incredible new album, I spent twenty minutes yesterday morning trying to download his new album. Took me four tries. And that redirect from IllegalArt.net is pretty amateur. Come on, man, get a real technology company in the mix. We’re here for ya. 
One point I want to make clear: we are not just another digital distribution company. Our belief is there are some very good digital distribution solutions out there already, and digital distribution is quickly becoming a commodity. What’s not anywhere near commodity status is marketing, and we are a marketing tools software company. We are about demand creation, not demand fulfillment. I call this out because the line is admittedly blurry in our above examples, since our first product is very much about direct-to-fan marketing, which in many ways resembles demand fulfillment from the consumer perspective. Note that none of the examples above are “just digital downloads”, they’re all compelling *packages* and include a physical component.
If you’re an artist, artist manager, agent, or other artist business partner, please drop us a line and we’ll see if we can get you a demo. But please be patient with us. We’re still small and even though we’re coming out of complete stealth mode the velvet rope is still up and we’re being very strategic about who we work with. This gives us the space to learn, make mistakes, correct mistakes, and in the end release a killer set of products to everyone. Thanks for understanding.
ian c rogers
Topspin
