Topspin™

To say we were excited at the prospect of helping David Byrne and Brian Eno release their new album would be an understatement. Not only are we huge fans of their recorded output both together and apart, but their previous collaboration under the same moniker, the pre-sampling cut/paste masterpiece My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts was one of the inspirations Topspin co-founder/chairman Peter Gotcher drew upon when creating ProTools with his team at Digidesign. Having the opportunity to help Byrne and Eno release their album direct to fans on Topspin’s platform was too fateful an opportunity to pass up. We jumped, to say the least.

So it’s with great pleasure I present to you the new album by David Byrne and Brian Eno, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. Hit play below, then press the full-screen button (in the lower right of the album widget), sit back, and enjoy what is IMHO one of the best albums of the year.

Feel free to click the Embed/Share button and add the album to your blog or Web site. If you’d like to own the album for playback on your iPod, CD, or in a collectible boxed set, buy the album direct from http://EverythingThatHappens.com. All three purchase options will give you the digital album immediately (FLAC options are at the bottom of the order page), and two include a nice package which will get shipped to you.

These facts:

• David Byrne and Brian Eno have a new record
• It’s not just one of the best things they’ve done since Bush of Ghosts but among the best recordings they’ve made together or apart in their careers
• You can listen to the album in its entirety, for free, and embed it anywhere on the Internet
• You can buy it direct from http://EverythingThatHappens.com in three different packages

…are the most important news in this post. I encourage you to stop reading this post now and spend the rest of the day if not the month with the album. I’ll tell you from experience it’s the kind of record you’ll find yourself wanting to listen to again and again, songs echoing in your head drawing you back for another listen. You know the kind, and you know they don’t come around often enough. Enjoy.

But if you’re one of the curious who is still asking, “Wait, so what does Topspin do again?” I’ll take this opportunity to reiterate our mission, tell you a bit about how our software is working with this Byrne/Eno project, and foreshadow what you might see from us the rest of the year.

Topspin basics: we’re a startup, just over a year old, offices in Santa Monica and San Francisco (connected by a killer, cost-effective video conf setup from our friends at LifeSize), mostly software engineers, building software to help artists make money. In the same way ProTools brought software solutions to music production, we seek to apply technology solutions for music marketing. Regardless of your opinion of the future of the music industry, I think we all agree the old way is not the new way and one “new way” hasn’t materialized yet. We know the cost of music production has fallen, the cost of distribution has fallen, and marketing is no longer concentrated in radio and MTV but has instead spread to places like Pitchfork and Brooklyn Vegan (or iPod commercials and Grey’s Anatomy). And I don’t think it’s controversial to say software will play a role in the future of music marketing. Artists, managers, and labels alike will use some sort of software to help them manage direct relationships with fans, find new listeners, measure the success of their business, pay licenses and royalties, etc.

Topspin builds marketing and monetization software platforms for the new music business. Specifically, we’re building three products, two of which are still under-wraps. Currently you’re seeing what I would call version 0.7 (not yet 1.0) of the first of those three, Topspin Manager. Topspin Manager helps you directly market to your existing fan base and collect and manage fans you are gathering through other activities (such as a great write-up in the Arts section of yesterday’s NYT). It ties together content management and fan management, and layers in a set of ever-improving direct and permission marketing tools, so you can keep a close relationship with your fans and give them your best, first.

One complaint which surfaced after recent press about Topspin griped we talk about our feature set as if we’re the first company to ever conceive of this sort of product. We are not. Companies like Echo Music, Reverb Nation, Nimbit, FanMail and others (including emerging open source solutions like CashMusic) have similar tools, crossing over with what Topspin is building in a variety of ways. That said, while they are all interesting in their own way, I don’t consider any of the above a direct competitor to Topspin. I encourage any artist looking for a software platform to check out what these (and other) companies have to offer. One of the most exciting things about the new music business is that artists have a wealth of options. We are very happy to have Topspin compete on the basis of our merits — the quality of our work and people.

The David Byrne and Brian Eno project started out simply, just collecting email addresses. Not a difficult task at all, but I’m still amazed at how many artists aren’t doing this actively or are still collecting their users at a place like MySpace where they don’t even have access to the email addresses of their fans (seems to me you should at least use a solution like Ning where you can export your email list). These email addresses go into Topspin Manager where they’re easily filtered and available for later phases.

Next David and Brian created a video announcing the tour and explaining the project. The video was loaded into our content management system and a widget was created to display it. The result isn’t anything magical, pretty much the same thing you could have done with YouTube or similar, but the “learn more” link links back to EverythingThatHappens.com, not YouTube or someone else’s site. It’s simple to create, reliable, easily embedded anywhere, and only promotes the artist’s Web site.

A couple weeks later a widget was added to the page offering up the download of a free track. The track was uploaded into the content management system, “spun” into a widget, and set for the email/track trade. We’ve made many improvements to this widget based on feedback we’ve received in recent weeks, and we’ll continue to (for example this evening we shortened the time of delivery of the track down from nearly ten minutes to almost instantaneous). The benefits of incorporating these best practices and software improvements will be passed along to all artists using our platform.

Tonight the entire album was loaded in, made available for unlimited streaming, and linked to the order page. Three offers were created at different price points, each with different associated digital media.

Note all of the features listed above were added to a third party Web host, EverythingThatHappens.com. We do not promote Topspin as a brand or destination, we are about helping the artist to build their business and their brand. Topspin’s platform provides a clean out of the box solution so artists can go from nothing to a working presence in minutes (see Imaad Wasif’s site for an example, he put that site together literally as he was packing the day before leaving for tour), integrates into third-party Web sites, and eventually we’ll be publishing our API for completely headless integration.

While we have a list a mile long of improvements we will be making in the coming days (please feel free to add your comments and feedback to this post or this thread on my personal blog, which already has some great constructive criticism on it), I’m extremely proud of what the Topspin team is showcasing here. I’m not going to call out everyone by name for fear I’d overlook someone, but y’all know who you are. Thanks sincerely. You kick ass. I’d run this team against anyone in the business. And we’re adding four more rock star engineers in the last two weeks of this month? Damn. Look out. Look out.

We’re heads down writing code and building out the platform for the rest of the year. We’ll launch a handful of artist projects this year, but we’re already turning away more work than we’re taking on. We really need to spend our time getting the product right, making all the improvements you’re suggesting, making sure the platform is as simple to use as possible from the artist side. That said, if you’re interested in what we’re up to and would like to be considered for our pilot program this fall, please drop us a line and let us know who you are and what you’re up to. We’re always looking for the good fits.

Thanks sincerely to David Byrne and Brian Eno (and all their incredible management and support) for taking a chance on us. It’s an honor to be a part of this project. Endless thanks to the Topspin team for being scary good. And thanks to you, dear reader, for your interest in what we’re up to and the feedback we’ll be using to improve what we do.

Bring the future closer faster,
ian c rogers
Topspin