Topspin Upgrades Platform, Partners With BerkleeMusic.com

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