Topspin™

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.

If you’re interested in reading about what we’re up to from others, Hypebot ran a much more succinct and very accurate piece this week, and Australia’s Nick Crocker ran a very flattering piece this evening. Thanks much to you both.

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!”

ian c rogers
Topspin

In Monday’s issue of The New York Times, media columnist David Carr gave readers a great overview of the grass-roots machine president-elect Barack Obama built by harnessing the power of online social networking – a machine that not only delivered the White House to him by a huge margin, but one that will no doubt have a hand in shaping policy and the overall role of the federal government.

By leveraging social networks and permission marketing best practices, Obama amassed a base of millions of dedicated supporters, all of whom willingly entered into what will be long and meaningful two-way conversations. And it all started with an equitable exchange of information for something of real value. This massive and energized support base was given a direct connection to the candidate, with the results being record-breaking fund raising and voter registrations, and an empowered electorate that will have a voice in the Obama administration.

“All of the Obama supporters who traded their personal information for a ticket to a rally or an e-mail alert about the vice presidential choice, or opted in on Facebook or MyBarackObama can now be mass e-mailed at a cost of close to zero. And instead of the constant polling that has been a motor of presidential governance, an Obama White House can use the Web to measure voter attitudes.”

What does this have to do with the music business? Everything! It’s the direct relationship between artists and fans (with nothing in between but the tools facilitating the conversations) that will drive this industry forward. The conversations start with something as simple as trading a free song download for an email address, and will evolve into long-term relationships in which fans are motivated and empowered to support their favorite artists through evangelism, patronage, and even feedback in the creative process.

Gary Brotman
Topspin

[Flickr photo by Print On Identity]

We’re here in London for MUSEXPO Europe and wanted to have a night out to say hello to anyone interested in hearing more about what we’re up to. Our friend Ian Hogarth from Songkick was kind enough to help us organize (or organise, as they say here) and we’re lucky enough to intersect with Hype Machine’s Anthony Volodkin’s 2008 world tour. So come on down and say hello to us Tuesday night, October 28th, at Bloomsbury Lanes. We’ll be there 8:30pm to midnight or so bowling, drinking, and making merry. We have a few spots for bowlers but it wouldn’t hurt to call and reserve a lane for yourself since we have no idea how many people might show up. Better safe than sorry.

See you Tuesday, at the conference, or around town…

ian c rogers
Topspin

Hey all, as mentioned last week, we’ll be in NYC for CMJ next week. If you’d like to say hello, please come visit us at Union Hall from 6-8pm Monday, October 20th. We’ll be there having a drink and maybe some food before seeing Fred Wilson’s new favorite band White Denim at the same venue later in the evening. Buy your ticket to the show here.

Wu, gots like come on thru. See you there.

ian

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:

Thursday, Oct 9, Bar Chloe, Santa Monica. We’ve been doing this Bar Chloe thing as many Thursdays as possible. I’ve been traveling and seeing shows and whatnot so I’ve missed the last few weeks but we’ll be in full e.f.f.e.c.t. this Thursday with Buddyhead’s Travis Keller playing Verve and Oasis b-sides and an entire crew from Berklee College of Music in the house. Come on down from 9 to midnight.

Monday, Oct 20, Brooklyn. We’ll be in NYC for CMJ and we’re going to try to get together somewhere near Union Hall in Park Slope around 6pm before seeing White Denim at Union Hall that night (likely even just at Union Hall, upstairs). If you’d like to come please mail the “general inquiries” address on this page and we’ll mail you when we know where it’s at. Or just subscribe to me on Twitter and I’ll send out an update on the 20th. Buy your White Denim ticket now, though. I just bought mine.

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.

ian c rogers
Topspin

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.

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

TopspinMedia.com is live.

Watch this space for an announcement later today.

We’re looking forward to seeing all of you at the party Friday night.

Peter