Two things happened last week which caused some to wonder if Topspin’s software tools were hard to use. I understood the concern: a) I was quoted in Digital Music News as saying Topspin’s target customers weren’t artists, but marketers (more on that below), b) We opened our Direct-To-Fan Marketing course to the public, and c) We haven’t shown off our software platform enough on our Web site so you can’t see how easy-to-use our self-serve software is. Unfortunately I left the door wide open for a couple of folks to take a swing at us, branding us as “hard to use”.
In fact Topspin’s software is quite easy to use, and I made a little video this evening to demonstrate. Take a gander and judge for yourself (full-screen mode highly recommended):
If I may, I’d like to clarify what I meant in the statements to Digital Music News last week about our target customers being marketers, not artists. We believe sincerely in this simple statement made by 37 Signals: “Hire the Right Customers” (click here for the chapter from their book “Getting Real”). As they suggest, we are choosing a target customer for the software: in our case the professional whose job it is to make people aware of, connect with, and become a paying customer of an artist. Might this marketer be the artist themselves? Sure. But we aren’t thinking about “your average artist” when we’re designing the software, we’re targeting marketing professionals.
Our customers are people at agencies like Eyes and Ears, Stagebloc, and Rocket Science; marketers and product managers from labels such as Sub Pop, Secretly Canadian, Atlantic, and Interscope; management companies like Red Light, The Collective, and Q Prime; distributors such as The Orchard and INgrooves; and of course artists-as-marketers like Sonoio, Nite Jewel, and Changing Clocks.
Our belief is if we target professional marketers when considering our feature priorities for Topspin we will build the product which will best address the needs of the broad market. We also believe many artists will take it upon themselves to learn to use the resulting software platform, just as many artists have invested the time to learn to use ProTools to great effect. We are indeed building an easy-to-use self-serve product anyone familiar with the Web can find their way around and many artists are and will be our customers.
But of course many artists won’t take the time to learn software like ours, and we don’t believe all artists need to become marketers to succeed. From powerful platforms like Topspin will spring reasonably-priced marketing specialists; we aim to support this emerging ecosystem. When we see a band like KC’s Ultimate Fake Book hire Eyes and Ears to build a great direct-to-fan marketing campaign for less than a band would have hired someone to build a Web site two years ago we feel the presence of this ecosystem in a real way.
We have seen thousands of direct-to-fan campaigns in the past three years and one thing is certain: execution is everything. We’ve watched campaigns by small, unsigned artists shock us with their effectiveness and we’ve seen campaigns by major label artists shock us with their lack of sales (unsurprisingly, the reverse is true, too, of course). The x-factor in every case is how the campaign was conceived and run. The courses we offer at Topspin aren’t about how to use the software. As you can see from the video above the software is not difficult to operate. The courses are about how to run effective campaigns. It is not a “build it and they will come” world, getting people to know you exist or have something new to offer is hard and getting harder as the amount of choice on the Web explodes. Successful campaigns take care and feeding. Apologies but we at Topspin aren’t interested in simply signing up as many artists as possible, collecting a couple hundred bucks from them, and having them watch their money trickle in. We’re targeting folks who can help artists move the needle and have a vested interest in the artists’ success, which is why we’ve targeted professional marketers as we’ve chosen our focus.
We also don’t pretend all the complicated rights in the music business don’t exist. Reality is many artists need and want the help of joint ventures with labels, marketers, merch companies, distributors, and other parties. We have designed our software to work with these companies so we can be a useful tool for whomever is overseeing the campaign, even if it’s multiple folks and those multiple people each need to be paid directly. We can all raise our fists and cry “fuck the man!” all day long but even the largest artists have cash-flow issues and just as startups will seek investors artists will look for partners who are willing to share the risk and reward. Our software aims to work in this reality and not simply wish for a day when everyone screens their own shirts (though my old punk rock band from high school did screen their own shirts and I’m thinking of putting a couple of them up for sale via Topspin soon).
I hope this helps clarify where we’re coming from. We’re simply defining exactly who our target market is, working closely with companies and individuals in this target market every day, and busting our asses to solve their needs with software. Are there things in the software our customers and we wish were easier to use? Absolutely, and we’re coding around the clock improving those week after week while at the same time we add the features they’re asking us for (see our weekly release notes for the play-by-play). In the process we’re making a software platform which does exactly what our customers need it to do based on daily feedback from them. Our hope and belief is over time we’ll find success with this approach. We’d love to be around a good long time and offer a lot of value to a wide array of people (you, either directly or indirectly!) along the way.
Thanks sincerely for caring enough about what we’re doing to talk about it. Please join the email list in the upper right of this page and we’ll keep you up to date on what we’re up to. Hopefully you’re starting to see how Topspin works in the daily posts here on our blog. Lots more coming in 2010.
We don’t sleep so you can,
ian c rogers
Topspin
