VPMD: Topspin Announces Two Additions to The Executive Team

I’m just back from a trip to MIDEM in France where I had an opportunity to talk to enough people my voice disappeared (big ups to everyone who came to our meetup!), among them other technology companies as well as many music companies, managers, and artists. I love MIDEM, it’s a great conference, we did a lot of business, and I’m really excited to start working with a lot of the people I met with in Cannes.

One thing that was clear to me was that Topspin’s thinking and technology on revenue generation and optimization is seemingly mature relative to the competition. Fact is, like any startup looking for success despite these “good times”, we spend much of our time thinking about making money, and that thinking is starting to pay off.

This is a good thing for the artists, managers, labels, distributors, agents, and other partners we work with because the majority of every dollar we make goes into their pockets. If we’re optimizing revenue it’s not just good for Topspin, it’s great for our partners. As I’ve said in the past, I’m primarily concerned with marginal profitability for artists, but it’s not entirely selfless, if they make more money Topspin makes more money. Ain’t no shame in this game and we’ve no reason to hide our focus.

To this end, it’s with great pleasure I announce to you Topspin’s new VP of Marketing and Artist Services, James Lamberti. James’ job: making money for Topspin and the artists we work with. James’ role encompasses Product Marketing (are we building the right product for our constituency and communicating its value effectively?), Artist Relations (this artist or label would like to utilize Topspin — can you help them out?), and Artist Services (hands-on marketing support and revenue optimization for artists and their business partners). James comes to Topspin after an 8-year stint at Comscore, where he was an SVP in charge of their Media and Technology vertical, a business he helped to build from the ground up. Prior to Comscore James was the marketer at Tickets.com, and he has a traditional marketing background with big brands like Clorox before that. The clincher, though, is that all the way through James moonlighted in a rock band called Blueland, decidedly non-sucky but success elusive, he knows what it’s like to bust your ass in the old system. An experienced analytical marketing executive with product development experience and a long tenure in a gigging rock band? I’m not sure I could have asked for a better VP of Marketing and Artist Services for Topspin, or VPMD as I’ve come to refer to his role, VP of Makin’ Dollars (EPMD fans will appreciate the reference, apologies to everyone else, though it’s hard for me to comprehend not being an EMPD fan). Welcome, James.

But that’s not all! Join me please in welcoming Kris Wehner, Topspin’s new VP of Engineering. Topspin is primarily a technology company and therefore Kris leads the majority of our staff from our San Francisco office, the team focused on building “ProTools for digital marketing” day after day. Most recently Kris was CTO at Aggregate Knowledge where he and his team built a very impressive technology powering real-time recommendations on top 20 Internet sites, which included real-time data analysis and dynamic ad serving capabilities. Prior to that Kris was a software architect at both Salesforce.com (heard of it?) and Tribe.net (sold to Cisco), building scalable systems for the CRM and social networking spaces, respectively. Most importantly, Kris is exactly the sort of intelligent yet humble, decisive yet personable leader Topspin has been looking for. We’re very lucky to have him joining our fighting force of extraordinary magnitude. He has our gratitude. Welcome, Kris.

It really feels like we’re ready for 2009. We’ll never stop changing and evolving, but this is definitely a point worthy of taking a look at where we’ve come from and the road ahead and feeling very excited. Kris, James, current Topspin Team, and everyone reading this, I look forward to working with you all this year. Let’s tear the roof off the mutha sucka.

ian c rogers
Topspin

PS – If you’re in LA next week for the GRAMMYs (or any other reason), come on by our meetup and say hello. RSVP here.