Sorry we haven’t been blogging much here as of late. Heads down and (clearly) hard at work in Topspin-land. A few random notes to share:
Digital Media Forum West was this week and I was on a panel with The Usual Suspects (TM) moderated by Ted Cohen giving a “digital state of the union”. Thanks very much to Ted for inviting us and for giving me the floor for a minute to share an overview of Topspin. I have to admit, I felt we were doing a bit of fiddling while Rome was burning. The discussion, and questions from the audience, was mostly about how startups can get access to the catalogs of major labels. I understand the frustration here. The lack of a reasonable APIs for an innovator like Muxtape to build a great consumer service on is inexcusable, especially when iMeem has already built the APIs and now just needs the licenses (and Universal and others are apparently rolling their own with TotalMusic instead of licensing the iMeem APIs for 3rd parties — I don’t have any inside info here, this is what I was led to believe from the panel). But there was no discussion of what the killer next consumer service would look like, and no discussion of how the relationship between the artist/manager nucleus and labels is evolving, which I think is the most important development of 2008. This evolution was being discussed this week at In The City in Manchester, however, where the “Featured Artist Coalition” was releasing a “charter for fair play in the digital age”. These, IMHO, are the values of the new music business, the one Topspin wants to be a part of. Read the charter. This isn’t “anti-label”, it’s anti-exploitation. I’m sure many labels will sign. Will yours? If not, do you want to work there? Friends, if you think I’m talking to you, I probably am.
It’s good meeting everyone at these conferences. Here’s a few more places we’ll be set up in the coming weeks and months if you’d like to reach out and say hello. Please do:
Week of Oct 26, London. We’re London-bound for Musexpo, in town for a full week, meeting lots of folks. We’re trying to find a venue for a Bar Chloe-style hang. If anyone has suggestions, lets hear ‘em.
Looking further out we’ll likely visit CES, MIDEM and SXSW early in 2009 and could use your help. Because we’re a small startup and trying to conserve our cash we try to couch surf when we go to these sorts of things. We’re sorted for NYC and London, but if you have a couch and a shower in any of these other places, drop me a note. We don’t require much.
Hope to see you at one of these events. If you’d like to be sure you’re kept in the loop, please subscribe to this blog by dropping your email over there in the right margin and I’ll try to keep the blog up to date with anywhere we’ll be.
And now, back to work. Our days are full of building software. Most of our time is spent building the 1.0 versions of our two flagship products, and we’re doing our best to stay focused on that despite some exciting stuff brewing on the sidelines. We’ll have a couple of fun things to announce this month and next. Thanks for reading.
ps - This post was written while listening to this Futureheads live bootleg they released on a beta version of our software. It’s a really great show. Highly recommended.
The release of David Byrne and Brian Eno’s Everything That Happens Will Happen Today has gone incredibly well, our servers handled the load splendidly and we’ve delivered many terabytes of MP3s and FLAC files around the world since the album’s release August 18th. You can see exactly where around the world the downloads were coming from in this mesmerizing video created by Eric:
If you’d like to post the album on your site or blog simply head over to EverythingThatHappens.com, click “Embed/Share”, copy the embed code, and paste into your site, MySpace page, etc. Then grab a screen shot and add it to the Flickr pool. Thanks!
Topspin was lucky to find Jim Bumgardner itching to join our fighting force of extraordinary magnitude and in his first couple of days on the job he created this mosaic of David and Brian from the cover of the album. Welcome, Jim!
ps - (unrelated to David Byrne and Brian Eno) If you’re waking up late from last night’s midnight showing of Rocky Horror Picture Show, jump over and grab the sampler from the new Repo! The Genetic Opera movie, released by Lionsgate this coming November, available via the movie’s Web site now.
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.
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
…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.
Spinnerette is the new project of Brody Dalle and Tony Bevilacqua of The Distillers. If you require a refresher of how solid, engrossing, and intense a force Brody is, dig this video from Reading a few years back:
That’s Tony working the slide. And that’s rock n roll.
But Spinnerette is definitely a departure from The Distillers. Different time of life for Brody, new band, new sound, and step forward. I’m really excited about this record.
Fans have been waiting to hear what Spinnerette has to offer for a long time, a few song samples were posted to their MySpace page ages ago but fans have been waiting for the songs while Spinnerette negotiated their way out of their label contract. No longer with Warner and currently independent, Spinnerette released their first track from their upcoming album via Topspin on Friday, 8/8/08. If you put your email addr on this page they’ll mail you a link to stream the song for free.
Also, our friends Jubilee released a new single and video while I was away (both free to anyone who bought the $20 package, of course), just a couple weeks ahead of their European tour and less than two months ahead of the full-length album, which is nearly finished but needs mixing and mastering (and will also be included in the $20 price tag). Travis and Aaron have been by the office regularly playing bits and pieces of it and it’s incredible.
Speaking of Travis Keller and Jubilee — Travis DJs on Thursday nights at Bar Chloe in Santa Monica (2nd Street near Broadway) and a few of us usually post up there for the evening and talk shop. Come on down and say hello. Starting this week we’re going to try a dinner/discussion beforehand. Not sure of the venue yet (though likely Gloria’s papuseria on Venice) — drop an email if you’re interested in attending and we’ll add you if there’s room. There’s always room at Bar Chloe, though, come by anytime 9pm to midnight if you’d like to say hello.
More fun stuff on the way in August, we’ll update as there’s news. As Robert Wyatt says, stay tuned…
UPDATE: Not making it to Bar Chloe tonight, didn’t realize Imaad Wasif’s LA show was tonight. So the new plan is: Gloria’s Cafe on Venice at 7:00pm then to The Smell downtown to see Imaad at 10pm. See you at the show. Buy Imaad’s album here.
Ryan and fellow Foundry partner and Topspin friend Jason Mendelson play in a band called Soul Patch. On June 21st Soul Patch played their first show in four years in Boulder, Colorado. I told Jason if Topspin and Foundry found themselves partners before the gig, I’d be there. As anyone following my Twitter stream knows, I made the show and was glad I did. They killed. iPhone photo of Jason stepping out from behind the kit for a run at the (moar) cowbell and vocals (second from left) and Ryan shredding the SG, above.
Music fans will remember Imaad from his work in both Lowercase and Alaska!, or from his solo record released on Kill Rock Stars. After going band-less with a label last time, Imaad pulled the band Two-Part Beast on board and went it alone on the business side this time around, self-funding, producing, and releasing himself.
Jubilee have been working with Topspin longer than I have.
Many months back my friend Travis Keller came to me asking how Jubilee should release their album digitally. He said they didn’t want to “just throw it up on iTunes”, they wanted to give people who were interested in what they were doing a chance to get the digital files, a 7″, and a leg up on the full-length album they were starting to make. I sent him to Shamal and Topspin. I was still at Yahoo! and didn’t know exactly what Topspin was up to yet, nor if they were even ready, but I had a hunch the two might be able to help each other out.
Turns out it was a good match. Jubilee was just the right band for Topspin to do some experimenting with, they were fresh, free of strings, full of ideas, and patient while the Topspin team worked out the bugs. Lucky for Topspin, Jubilee’s music was amazing, too, and they’ve been making fans out of pretty much anyone who takes a listen. But don’t take my word for it. Head over to Jubilee.la and stream the first EP for yourself and see if it’s your thing. If you like rock music, I’m guessing you’ll dig it. If you do, buy the $20 package, get yerself the 7″ and they’ll be emailing you the full album very soon.
When I was considering joining the Topspin team, Jubilee’s experience with Topspin had more weight than anyone realized. Just as I was deliberating on my decision Travis called me just to thank me for connecting them with Topspin. “Dude, your friends are going to change the world,” he told me. It’s one thing to listen to the pundits. It’s another to hear it from the artists to whom Topspin was cutting checks.
Corny as it sounds, reading that makes me tear up a bit. That’s what it’s all about, folks. At the Topspin party last Friday night Aaron and I spent some our short time together (when we weren’t geeking out over the live Theramin player) arguing over who was more honored to work with who. I still say it’s Topspin’s honor.
Get that new record up there, guys. The new mixes you played at the party on Friday were incredible. Bring it.
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.
