Oktoberfest

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.