It’s been a while since we’ve had one of our Bar Chloe meetups, and we’re going to try to make them a regularly scheduled event again. Plan is to post up at Bar Chloe 7-10pm the last Monday of each month, starting with this coming Monday the 29th of June.
Not only will there be music and drinks, but Bar Chloe has food and are extending happy hour to 8pm for us. Check the menus and come for dinner.
Come on out, and let’s talk about the future of music.
For those who don’t know, NARM is the National Association of Recording Merchandisers, the trade group for music retailers which is increasingly seeing membership from companies like iTunes, Amazon, and Rhapsody, as well as mobile carriers and a few of us rag tag startups such as Topspin. The NARM Connects Conference 2009 was held last week in San Diego and it was Topspin’s first visit to the gathering.
But much better than my interview is Mike Masnick of Tech Dirt’s incredible presentation from earlier in the day. Mike is very kind to Topspin in his presentation and you should discount my opinion accordingly but this is, IMHO, a must-see. Please take a run through and send to everyone you know who cares about the future of media. Mike’s words may be a little hard to swallow but they’re based in reality and he offers not just commentary but a suggested solution (CwF + RtB = $$$), something few have the balls to do these days:
We also had the good fortune of receiving an award at Wednesday night’s awards ceremony. Somewhere between Norman Lear, Transworld’s Bob Higgins, all around rad dude Don Van Cleave, Ashford and Simpson, and Hall and Oats, Topspin was awarded a Business Innovation award from NARM. We were very proud to be nearly the only startup in a field of award winners such as Universal, Warner, and EMI. Thanks to all involved. It was truly an honor.
There were a lot of awards at the end of the presentation and they were discouraging speeches, so instead I stumbled up and nervously stammered a few mildly coherent words. Not sure what I actually said, but this is what I was trying to say:
“We’re a young company, less than two years old, and we certainly haven’t done anything worthy of an honor from you all just yet, though we hope to. I think the reason we’ve had a lot of attention in the past year plus is because we are actually very optimistic about the future of the music business, or at least about profitability for artists, which is the most important thing in the entire business. Thank you sincerely for this award, it’s truly an honor to be in the business of music.”
Thanks for watching and reading. Please RT, tell a friend, all that good stuff. And have a happy Father’s Day.
Hello London! We’re headed your way next week for a few meetings and a couple of runs around Princess Di Park. If you’d like to say hello, please come to the meetup we’re hosting with our friends at Songkick (in order to keep the intercontinental Ian balance Ian Hogarth will be in the US while I’m in London, but his co-founder Pete will be hosting from the Songkick side).
We’ll be at Electricity Showrooms from 7:30pm onward Wednesday evening for some serious music startup geek action. Come on through, and spread the word.
I first heard Eminem on The Wake Up Show long before he had been produced by Dr. Dre. I was blown away and bought the EP mail order from SandboxAutomatic.com (their site hasn’t changed much since). A lot has changed for Em since then but one thing has not: Eminem is one of the most talented MCs in the history of rap. Love him or hate him, it’s hard to deny his skills (or Dre’s beats (or Beats — that one’s for you, Jimmy)). They’ve done it again and it’s a blast to help them with their direct-to-fan campaign. Come on over to Eminem.com for a soon-to-be-rare limited edition package including Eminem’s John Hancock, a commemorative pill bottle (!), vinyl, hoodies, and optionally an Undefeated t-shirt made in a limited run of only 313. Maybe someday it’ll be worth what this Nike from Eminem’s last record is going for on Ebay.
On a slightly different note, this month has seen the launch of not one but three different projects where the music sold raises money for charity:
ps - I’m just realizing that the Byrne/Eno record came with a little pill, the Em record comes with a pill bottle, and Josh Freese was offering “take shrooms and drive around in Danny from Tool’s Lamborghini”. Coincidence or inadvertent direct-to-fan theme?
A few weeks ago I spoke on a panel at Leadership Music Digital Summit in Nashville and was asked, “So you’re saying that email marketing is still more important than, say, Twitter or Facebook?” I responded, “Yes. Quantifiably.” I went on to say that in the campaigns Topspin has run so far we’re seeing Facebook represents 2-4% of first-week sales and Twitter 1-2%.
In the first day of release, Twitter lead the traffic drivers to the Jimmy Eat World site, with more than 22% of all traffic coming straight outta Twitterland. Twitter was third as a driver of revenue, though, driving just over 20% of all sales. Still, with the large number of people reached, and email a smaller percentage of total sales in this campaign than we see on average, it’s very reasonable to conclude that Twitter was a meaningful driver of incremental revenue in this case, and there’s no question they proved you can do much better with Twitter than I led the crowd in Nashville to believe just a couple weeks previous.
What’s interesting is this single event added meaningful incremental sales to the project, many months after the original release. The behavior mirrored that of a “Slashdot Effect”, large volume and low conversion (conversion to sale was less than half a percent, compared with 11% for the email campaign), but an impressive and needle-moving revenue number simply from one person giving a less-than-140-character endorsement.
Also interesting are the tools we are able to use to track this sort of thing. Note Trent re-Tweet’d the shortened URL I Tweet’d originally, http://awe.sm/2q5. This was made with a URL shortening service Awe.sm (full disclosure: this is my good friend Jonathan Strauss’ company and I’m involved on an advisory basis) and as a result I can easily track the click-throughs on the URL. Between Twitter Search, TweetReach, Awe.sm (or other great services like bit.ly), Google Analytics, and the Topspin sales data one can pull together (and cross-check) some pretty interesting data on reach and conversion down the path to purchase. One interesting finding: 25% of the clicks on the URL came from OUTSIDE the Web, that is, mobile and AIR/desktop clients.
What to conclude from all this? That Twitter is the marketing machinery of the future? Naw. This isn’t about “the next big thing”. It’s about how little we know about how marketing will work and how transactions (not just purchases, but any kind of value exchange) will be earned (and I do mean earned) in the future. Success is highly variable. Execution matters (as James said). Unexpected events can make an impact. People are powerful marketers. But not only are the drivers for traffic evolving, the tools we use to measure the attention economy are going through a really interesting growth phase. It’s hard not to be excited by seeing some of these tools work in ways that are more than just novel, they’re shuffling meaningful amounts of attention around and making real money for artists. Exciting times indeed.
Sorry there haven’t been more posts on this blog this week. We’ve been busy working on the next version of the Topspin platform and releasing tons of music. Things are boiling over today, though, so I wanted to take a moment to drop a few links into this blog post…
Our friend Josh Freese is having quite a run with his “Since 1972″ release. If you haven’t already heard about this madness, check out the packages on JoshFreese.com, or these Wired interviews with Josh here and here. I love seeing that Josh is SOLD OUT of many of the high-end packages but what makes me even happier is watching the Twitter chatter and seeing that not only do people think the packages are funny they also LIKE THE ALBUM and are telling their friends to buy the music. It’s working, yo. I actually had the good fortune of meeting the purchaser of the $20K package on Sunday night and he’s a super cool guy who said he was having a ton of fun with Josh. Josh took him to a Vandals show on Sunday, then for pizza at Mark Mothersbaugh’s house (with a crazy view), then to the Puscifer show downtown. All of this before he even started on the promised package!
Metric’s new album, Fantasies, finally dropped last week, along with a stunning video for “Gimme Sympathy” which is getting play everywhere I turn (in my house, at least — my two year old wants it on repeat). I can’t tell you what a joy it’s been to work with such a forward-thinking band and management team on an extremely well-run campaign. Their digital, CD, and vinyl offerings are amazing and the pre-sale was a success (sold out of the deluxe packages in less than two weeks). It’s incredibly rewarding to work with bands people are passionate about, and to say Metric is such a band is an understatement. Stream the video and entire album above. They are the future in so many ways. We love you, too, Metric.
I have to say I’m really impressed with how Riverboat Gamblers manage their Web site and MySpace. Great design, and great use of the Topspin tools. Thanks much, y’all.
ps - I’m speaking at Dave Hyman’s Music Technomica in San Francisco tonight (Tuesday, April 7th). It’s invite-only but if you’d like an invite Tweet to @iancr and I’ll send you the info.
As such, I wanted to expand on a couple of points I heard on the panel. First Walter said step one to being successful is simply being a great live band. Second, Storm and Jim both talked about establishing a direct relationship with fans rather than treating them strictly as “consumers” (Jim hypothesized “the feminization of marketing” which I couldn’t do justice to — maybe he’ll blog about it if you’re curious). Personally I think both of these things are true but how you do each is just as important, not trivial, and being re-pioneered and re-defined. I bumped into two artists this weekend who are using their opening tour slots to build new relationships with fans and wanted to tell their tale as an addendum to our panel on Friday.
[Topspin doesn't work with either artist, yet]
I met a band called Halestorm through the magix of the Interwebz. They were in LA making their record with Howard Benson when they saw word of one of the Topspin meetups on Twitter. They came out, introduced themselves, and we talked the future of music a bit. Turns out they’re on Atlantic and touring with Shinedown. Luck would have it they were playing Boston the same weekend I was there for the conference and visiting my eldest daughter Zoe (who’s in college at MIT). After securing some heavy duty earplugs for my two year-old we rolled out to the new House of Blues across the street from Fenway to check out the show.
Halestorm knows what to do with an opening slot like the one they have now with Shinedown. They get 30 minutes every night in front of a crowd of people, most of whom have never heard of them, and they convert as many of them as possible to fans. I stood in the balcony and watched it happen. Here’s what I saw:
Lzzy starts solo with a guitar around her neck and a mic, just singing acapella. Long notes, killer voice. She has people cheering for her before the rest of the band even walks out on stage. Before her voice gets hidden behind the rock, she lets ‘em know she can sing and you can see people are impressed straight away.
The rest of the band appears and they tear through a few songs. It’s straight-ahead rock, on the heavy side but ready for pop radio. Everyone in the band is high-energy and engaging, even Lzzy’s brother Arejay on drums is standing up for parts of the songs and just generally being a showman.
Mid-way through the set Lzzy announces they have a new record coming out in a few weeks but you can buy a pre-release of it now for $5 at the merch stand.
There’s a drum solo-y part that doesn’t go on long and ends with the entire band at the front of the stage playing drums and the crowd cheering as they go crazy with it.
During the last song Lzzy reminds them that they have their own merch stand upstairs and CDs for only $5. She also says the whole band is going to be up there after their set and that she wants to meet everyone.
I head over to the merch stand after the show and watch their tour manager relieve the woman who runs the merch table so she can disappear into the crowd below with a box of CDs with “Halestorm CDs $5” written on it.
The merch stand is mobbed. It’s surrounded by people and they are selling merch literally as fast as their tour manager can manage.
The band appears (after breaking down their own stage setup) and meets and talks to as many people as possible, while helping to sell their merch.
Free stickers list their MySpace page, etc.
Very very well done. I’m not worried about these guys at all. Even if the record doesn’t work at radio (it may) they’re going to do just fine building their audience one show at a time.
The next day I heard from another artist who found me on the Internet after one of my public speaking to blog post translations: D.A. from the Harvard-educated and on Pharrell’s label Chester French. Chester French has an opening slot on the Lady Ga Ga tour and it turns out D.A. was not only in the same town as us for a Monday night show his tour bus was parked at the same hotel we were staying at.
D.A. is one savvy guy, far from your average bear, and runs his own Salesforce.com setup to manage his band relationships with everyone from press to fans. He hands out cards every night with his URL, TellMe number, Twitter URL, and an email address that automatically adds people to his Salesforce setup.
Not only that, but he hustles on the street selling CDs after every show. People who saw them play, people who didn’t, passerbys, anyone who will give him $5 in exchange for a CD.
So yes, I encourage you to support these artists: follow Halestorm or D.A. on Twitter, pre-order Halestorm or Chester French’s upcoming releases. But also, watch and learn. These artists aren’t waiting for someone at the label to make them a priority (though I think both are priorities for their respective labels). They’re using the tools, doing the work, connecting directly and building real relationships with fans. That’s as close to a silver bullet as you’re going to get.
ps - I am posting this mid-flight, BOS to LAX, Virgin American Air. Wifi and laptop power in the sky! I’d like to say it feels futuristic, but really it just makes the past feel primitive. For anyone who is curious what the bandwidth is like, here’s the result of a speed test.
The honest truth is that who is using Topspin currently is a bit ad hoc, gated by how many hours we have in our day and how many people we think we can help be successful at the moment. As we mentioned this is ramping up, but still limited. Sorry about that. We appreciate your patience. We have even established a mailing list for *all* artists to come and share marketing ideas. Just mail us to get added. I assure you that our passion and interest lies in bands of all sizes. Compare that with solutions like Echo Music or even Sparkart, both of whom have a self-professed interest in “established” artists only. Our current limitations are practical ones, not philosophical ones. Be patient with us and we will get there. Our goal is to be a successful, long-term business.
Hearing Imaad Wasif and The Drones thank Topspin from the stage “for all your support” this week was refutation enough in my book but if you’d like a little more, check out this comment left on TechDirt by Joe Purdy’s manager:
Hello,
Nice article except that I think that possibly you may not know that Top Spin DOES work with smaller artists. Not just Byrne or Beasties.
Have you ever heard of Joe Purdy? HELL NO you haven’t or you would know he used Topspin to launch his 10th album this week. Ok and I manage him so this is also a shamess plug as well but the point is that we’ve been working within Topspin’s philosophy for a few years now. Selling direct to fans without a label. His catalog has sold over 800,000 tracks on Itunes in the US alone.
When I heard about Topspin I went over to the office and they showed me what they had built and I crapped my pants. The platform is everything I was doing but on steroids. It’s true that they aren’t picking up every single artist under the sun out there. That’s for companies who build ugly widgets. They are picking up artists who have a growing base or artists who can expand their already successful base. I think that will set them apart from companies that pop up every 3 months with a Ralph Kramden idea to save the music business.
Joe Purdy’s new album sold about 500 downloads in the first 24 hours via Topspin. I was able to release it 2 hours after Joe finished his cover art and approved the mastered audio. His fans knew that from the email that we sent to them and they felt special! They knew that they had it immediately and felt empowered. AWESOME! Word of mouth, instant back end info on who is buying and where, direct email thank you to the fan, viral player that spreads our store across the web, super distribution, more fans, I love it!!!
Check out what I’m talking about. Buy the new album, hell buy the other 9 albums direct from Joe Purdy Records. http://joepurdy.com/lastclockonthewall.html
Hello from Austin, Texas, home of the one and only SXSW Everything Conference. As I’m typing this to you from my hotel room at The Hilton, pure madness fills the streets just below me. It’s the industries of “interactive technology” (whose conference ended today) and music (whose conference starts tomorrow) colliding in a drunken melee crossed between mardi gras and Little 500 with one important difference: everyone is here to experience the greatest pleasure in life, music.
We’re here all week demonstrating the latest version of our software for artists, managers, and labels. A popular question has been, “so Topspin has a lot of hype but, um, what do you do exactly?” I apologize to anyone who has come to this site in the past looking for something more “marketing-y”. In all honesty we’ve been putting our effort into building our platform and serving our artists rather than our Web site. We are still in invite-only mode and have been very fortunate to work with some of our very favorite artists and thankfully we haven’t had to do much in the way of marketing. I promise we’ll be updating the Web site soon with more details (now that we have a much better sense of what we’re doing and how we’re doing it) but in the meantime I’ll take this opportunity to give you an overview of the latest version of our software, some of the success we’ve had thus far, and tell you about our exciting (IMHO) partnership with BerkleeMusic.com.
Starting at the top: Topspin is a technology-driven direct-to-fan marketing, management and distribution platform. On a grand scale, we’re looking to do for music marketing what Pro Tools and other digital recording software did for music production — build a democratizing software application which changes how music is marketed. On a more tangible level, we’re simplifying workflow for digital marketing. We’ve been in private beta mode with relatively few (about 40) artists thus far and are opening this up to a wider range of artists, but we still plan to service only a few hundred bands this year. Eventually Topspin will be self-serve, but we are looking to refine the software and make sure the folks currently using the platform are successful before we open it up to so many bands we can’t give them all at least a modicum of personal attention.
As I mentioned in last week’s post, everyone in the company is focused on one of two things: either building the Topspin platform or serving our artists directly. The latest version of the software is based heavily on what we learned serving campaigns like David Byrne and Brian Eno’s Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, Arcade Fire’s Miroir Noir, Metric’s Fantasies, and Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique (just to name a couple) and includes a new widget platform, email system, audience targeting, analytics dashboard (including a cool feature called Topspin Rank), and an improved purchase flow. Stop by our office and you can see a list of 32 features and fixes we plan to add to this mix before the middle of the year. Our engineering team has their heads down, bayonets engaged, and eyes on the prize. Look out.
Topspin is more about demand generation than demand fulfillment. We approach marketing on three fronts: direct (email and the like), viral (quality driving organic person-to-person marketing), and targeted (such as targeted paid placement).
We’ve had great success on the viral marketing front. Early on in the lifecycle of the Byrne/Eno campaign we were pleasantly surprised to find a purchases to streams ratio of 20%. Our quest then became getting as many people as possible to hear this great album via the streaming widget which drove sales directly on the artist’s site. To date we have seen hundreds of sites embed this widget and millions of impressions and streams. With the new Topspin platform it takes seconds to build one of these widgets and embed it anywhere on the Web, with support for audio, video, images, and even Flickr. What’s more, you can see what sites are moving the needle for your business with asset-level analytics and tracking.
It’s possible you’ve seen some of our progressive ads floating around out there on the Web. By intelligently targeting artist fan bases, using creative which easily allows fans to express interest in an artist for free, and using proprietary optimization techniques, we’ve had great luck increasing the size of an artist’s fan base.
Fans really do love to hear from their favorite artists via email. In fact they expect their favorite artists to give them the inside scoop first if they’ve asked them to. So it’s no wonder we continue to see email marketing as a power-tool in an artist’s arsenal, with 30% of sales coming through this channel and click-through rates which demolish the industry average — consistently north of 50%. We’ve beefed up these tools significantly with improved fan segmenting and targeting by geography. Playing a show in Kansas City? Wouldn’t it be nice to mail just fans within 100 miles of KC? No problem.
There’s fantastic support for hi-res content such as HD video, FLAC, and Apple Lossless. On the Paul’s Boutique release 55% of all customers chose some form of lossless content! I have to admit, I’m completely blown away by that number. I can’t tell you how stoked I am to know our customers care about quality.
Our dashboard is the tool we hope artists, managers, and labels spend the first 20 minutes of their day with, a flash of data that at a glance shows what the blogs are saying, recent Flickr photos, and activity on a host of services such as MySpace, YouTube, Amazon, and many more. Also, we’ve allowed artists to compare themselves to other artists with a feature called Topspin Rank. Topspin Rank uses publicly available artist data to show relative popularity and gives you access to the data you need to improve relative to your peers or competitive set.
Most importantly, Topspin drives sales. Not only does Topspin give more to the artist on a percentage basis than iTunes, but Topspin’s revenue-per-sale CRUSHES iTunes at a current average of $22 per sale! Conversion is also far above the industry average at approximately 6%. As the t-shirts we’re wearing here at SXSW say: Topspin — It fucking works.
And of course literally hundreds of bugs have been fixed and entire portions of the code have been refactored in a never-ending quest for the perfect media marketing software. We have a long way to go, but we have zero intention of ceasing the quest.
As we offer Topspin’s software to more artists, it’s important to us artists, managers, and labels have top-notch support in using the software. In this spirit we are ecstatic to announce a partnership with Berklee College of Music’s online school, BerkleeMusic.com, to provide a course called “Marketing Your Music With Topspin”. This course takes an in-depth look at the new world of music marketing with a focus on Topspin’s software. Your final project will be bringing a band (your band?) to market. Course signup starts in July and the course will begin in September of 2009. We truly couldn’t be more proud to count Berklee as a partner and are very excited to see students start coming out of this course and launching campaigns for bands on our platform.
Thanks sincerely to everyone who has been following along as we grow. We truly appreciate your patience and support. As Ozzy likes to say, “I LOVE YOU ALL!”
Topspin is hitting SXSW full force this year, nearly a full week of back-to-back music and meetings in Austin, a couple of press releases, a panel, and maybe even a few lines at Mabel Davis Park.
We’d like to see YOU there. We’re co-sponsoring Little Radio’s music fest at Red Eyed Fly, noon to 6pm Weds March 18th through Friday March 20th. Topspin team will be in the house quite a bit over those three days, but we’ll be there FOR SURE for rock and meetup 4-6pm on Wednesday and Friday so come on through and say hello! Just don’t interrupt me when The Drones are playing, please…
All week long we’ll be meeting with artists, managers, labels, and the like demo’ing the latest version of the Topspin software. We’re already pretty booked up but if you’d like us to try to find time to meet with you just drop us a note and we’ll see what we can do. If we can’t book a specific time, please just come by Red Eyed Fly between 4pm and 6pm Weds or Friday, say hello after my panel, or stop one of us with the Topspin t-shirts on the street (or at the skate park).
You can also keep decent track of Topspin whereabouts via Twitter. Here are Twitter handles of those of us from Topspin heading down to Austin:
Below is the band schedule at the Little Radio/Topspin/Nudie Jeans day party shindig dance-a-thon. I will personally try to be on-hand to catch White Denim, Phosphorescent, FREELAND, Amanda Palmer, Imaad Wasif, and, of course, The Drones. Lots of other great stuff there, too. Come hang out and see it all.
