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.
Aaron North (Jubilee’s founder, has played with NIN, Icarus Line, etc) wrote a very complimentary explanation of Topspin to his fans on their MySpace page this weekend (in that inimitable Aaron North style Buddyhead readers know so well). My favorite paragraph is the last one:
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.
Okay, created a membership and tried to buy the Jubilee membership and it’s not working. I can go to the Topspin fan dash and see that everything is working there, but when I try to log in at the Jubilee site it just resets to the login flash page every time I hit enter. There’s no indication of what’s going wrong or any error page. Also, when I try to go to the help page at topspin I get a page does not exist error. I’m using Firefox 3 on OSX.
Okay, works in Safari, what the fuck? Also, in the middle of creating my account an empty cart popped up. It was right after I entered the first set of data, name address, etc. Since the cart was empty I tried to add in the membership and it threw me out of the sign-up process. Then I couldn’t log in to finish and had to go to the topspin site to fix my account. Not that it did me much good.
Hey Mister Slim ~
There are a few known issues in our app that we’re planning on resolving in our next production push. Our apologies for the frustration and any inconvenience!
There is some information that would be really helpful in further assisting you: a) the email address that you’re using to attempt the membership purchase, and b) your browser statistics available by navigating to the following address: http://app.topspin.net/account/browser_info
Alternatively, I’ll receive this same information if you’d like to submit a support request via Jubilee’s report a bug link: http://app.topspin.net/artist/192/information?account_id=192&pmod=help
I’d be happy to give you a call as well if you’d like to provide a phone number.