How to use Topspin to promote a 400 seat club concert

Friends of Topspin,

When Topspin asked me to share an artist’s perspective on using the platform, I couldn’t wait to write this blog post. In addition to being a full-time product designer at Topspin, I’m also a long time folk musician with an up-and-coming band in San Francisco called BASECAMP. It’s certainly no coincidence that I play music and work in these digs. Being able to use my experiences as a musician to design rocker-specific software is a dream job I never even thought existed until a year ago. Being able to also use this software to promote my own music makes the work incredibly more meaningful.

Which is why I am thrilled and humbled to be writing this post. Tonight, BASECAMP is playing our biggest show yet at San Francisco’s Rockit Room (formally The Last Day Saloon). We’ve dedicated four months of planning, practice and web strategy for just one club gig, and I’m hoping it’s really going to pay off tonight. We got offered this show after the bar owner saw us play a previous Monday night back in October. He knew we didn’t have the draw to fill his 400 person club, but he liked our sound enough to trust we’d find a way. So I had a great problem. How do I get new fans (that don’t even know me yet) to all come a show four months from now? How do l also make the most of this opportunity for my band in the long-term? Sounded like a great challenge for me as a musician, a great test for the Topspin platform.

I chose a simple goal: I didn’t want to make money, I wanted to build my network. If I was going to spend all this time (oh, and money) to promote a concert and get the word out, I wanted to also be establishing long-term fan relationships with people who really dug my music. That meant getting more emails from more avid fans. Topspin is great for selling media, but how could I tweak this to build a richer direct-to-fan experience for a club show? Something more than passing out flyers, posting bills and getting the Chronicle to do a short blurb about me.

We thought hard about the best way to sincerely help our fans. We lowered door prices, gathered some fun, eclectic supporting bands and gave the show an interesting face that we could talk up around town. We dubbed the night “Rock The Pink Slip” and branded the gig as a discount concert for our fans during hard economic times in San Francisco. We talked the bar owner into dropping the door price from $12 to $8. We convinced the three other bands into playing with us for free. We then immediately began offering subsidized, “recession-proof” discounted door entry through our website for as low as $2.50. It was pretty simple. Basically, people bought a .pdf file and their name goes on the guest list. This offer that was only available on our website, so all the traffic moved to us. We built an offer page for the show, featuring all the bands, info and links to the purchase flow. You can check out the site here:

http://basecampmusic.com/pinkslip

Once we had built a place for fans to go and learn about us, we put that URL out E-V-E-R-Y-W-H-E-R-E. BASECAMP has dropped a press release & the URL on 237 websites, 14 local newspapers, a handful of 3rd party blogs, and generated some new fans by running ads on 5 different ad networks. Oh, and we also did the postcards, flyers, bills and general pavement pounding anyway.

The Topspin platform allowed us to share our video across Facebook and send out rich HTML emails promoting the show, something that’s been super key for us for awhile now. We were also able to outfit our homepage with widgets that tracked fan usage and gave us great opportunities for fans to interact withour music. While the widgets worked great in the wild, we also ended up building our own “ticket” widget for our homepage:

Check out the Ticket Widget here

I think we’re like alot of bands that will always want some super custom widgets for special situations like this. And it’s cool, we all should learn to design this stuff to some degree. It goes with the business. What I really care about from Topspin is the wealth of data the widgets were bringing back to me. Every day, see what new fans we were getting from which activities, where they were coming from and what songs and videos they were most into. We were quickly able to rarefy our approaches even in just the last couple of weeks. It’s definitely been a science in many ways.

So it’s 12 hours till our show, and I gotta say, it’s pretty hard to get people to buy a club ticket. It’s also good to know that all this work will remain a long-term resource beyond just this show. We’ve set ourselves up with a network that we can rely on more and more. Still I do think that no amount of software will ever replace the message you put in someone’s hand after you play a local open mic. Topspin’s great to help support, organize and inform your work, but ultimately it’s the musicians getting real about connecting with their fans. No bullshit, no gimmicks; it’s really been refreshing.

I’ll post a comment here (maybe some video) this weekend and let you all know how the show turned out.

Have a good weekend,

Christopher Grant Ward
Topspin and BASECAMP