Partner Spotlight: Taylor Brigode, Red Light Management

Our partner ecosystem is one of Topspin’s greatest assets. From marketing and web development to management and distribution, these partnerships offer top-quality services from companies that integrate seamlessly with Topspin’s platform. But who are the mysterious men and women behind these companies? This interview series aims to answer that question. Today it’s time to meet Taylor Brigode of Red Light Management, the firm that manages dozens of high-profile artists.

Who are you, and what do you do on a daily basis in your role?

My name is Taylor Brigode and I work for Red Light Management, ATO and TBD Records. We don’t really have titles at our company, so I guess you can call me one of several people in charge of digital marketing and strategy for our artists. My day tends to consist of three parts. One is answering questions, giving our managers advice about whatever it is they are working on at the moment and coming up with new ways to grow our artists’ careers in the digital space. Part two is the mechanical aspect of my job, maintaining websites, building tools on the web for artists and dealing with marketing platforms like Topspin and all the details that go along with that. The third part of my job is talking to people at technology companies that we do business with, or might have interest in doing business with. There are lots of other assorted things I do everyday that don’t fit into those three boxes (like listening to records, eating hamburgers and drinking overpriced coffee) but that’s more or less the bulk of my time.

Red Light was one of the first management companies Topspin started working with, which probably means you’ve had an impact on the app that everyone is using today. What have been some of the most welcome new features?

We started using the platform more or less at the beginning, when it was in its awkward, acne-ridden, “stealth” phase. I’ve tried to give as much feedback as I can because I really like using it and the people who are building it. Lucky for me, many of the feature requests I have sent in have ended up in the app. One of my favorite additions has been the ability to run a pre-order campaign that auto-delivers a digital album (or any digital asset) at a specific time on release date. Being able to handle pre-selling an album in a elegant way was something we wanted from the beginning and discussed a lot. More recently, the improved ability to tag a group of fans who ordered a certain product and send them an email is really amazing; I use that feature probably every day. Having the option to batch edit metadata was also a big one.

Have you tried other direct-to-fan platforms along the way? How have they compared? You don’t have to name names if you don’t want to.

We work with so many artists, in different genres, on different labels, of different sizes, that I get to see a tremendous amount of different platforms for selling and marketing things. I’ve likely used, or at least demo’d, all the popular ones that are out there right now and they each seem to have their own strong points. Selling stuff directly to fans is a really interesting area of the music business right now simply because there is so much competition. While I won’t say what I don’t like about the other platforms, I will say I like using Topspin because, 1) I’m most familiar with how it works and 2) because of its ability to let me do whatever I need, 24 hrs a day. With Topspin, as long as I can code it and the App supports it, I know it can more than likely do what I need to do, whenever I need to do it, which is something I really appreciate. I’ve always been a practical DIY solutions kinda of guy and I think Topspin helps me work that way. I hate having to wait for someone else to move something or change a setting. That said, I remain open to what else is out there and try to test out everything that seems interesting.

Can you talk about some of the projects you’ve done using Topspin?

The last Drive-By Truckers record, The Big To-Do, was a really great project to work on. It was highly successful for us in so many ways. We doubled the band’s email list and improved its open rate significantly using a free song for email download, which seems elementary when you think about it, but it just works really well. Then we had a pre-order that beat all estimates and had the best first week sales ever for the band, which is something I love with a band that’s been around for a while because the market is so down right now. If you can go up in a down market, you are doing alright.

A big part of what made that campaign such a success though was everyone having their shit in order. One of the band’s managers, Christine, is super on top of all the details, getting merch made and shipped, what it costs, getting email copy from the band, the list goes on forever but she stays on top of it. My best advice to anyone who wants to have a successful campaign is pay attention to the details and stay ahead of schedule. I can’t tell you enough what a difference this makes. If you are on it, you will make more money than if you’re behind the eight ball and rushing, at least that’s been my experience.

More recently, Amos Lee was another great one to work on. Amos ended up with his best debut ever and a #1 album, which everyone loves getting. I can’t say for certain that the direct to fan sales made the difference, but it’s possible that without them we wouldn’t have had a #1 record.

Red Light is a large management company. How do you go about deciding what artists for which you’re going to use Topspin?

It depends on a lot of different factors really. Is the band on a label and which one? Do they have an exclusive merch deal that they pay a percentage of sales to? Can we afford the upfront cost of building a store page? How much set up time do we have?
For some projects and artists, it’s a great fit, for others it doesn’t work for one reason or another but every time we put a band on the platform and our execution is on point, we seem to do really well, so we keep pitching it to managers. Execution is everything though really. I don’t think there’s a platform in the world that will sell an inferior, overpriced, late shipped, poorly presented product well.

What are some of the killer features you’re still waiting for?

The platform itself is pretty solid at this point, it can always improve of course but I don’t know if there is one killer feature that’s missing for me. I think the things I’d like to have all involve integrating with other services, like an integrated shipping service the way PayPal has it, for projects were we are shipping merch ourselves, or the ability to deliver music to other digital retailers or streaming services from inside the app.

There’s been a renewed interest and focus on artists having great web sites, but they’ve morphed into hubs or jumping-off points for fans. Are there any valuable trends you’ve seen develop over the last year?

I don’t know when people stopped focusing on artists having great websites. I hope that didn’t happen.
I think there’s been a major shift in the last few years from website as an extension of the creative project to website as a functional business tool. You’ll still see the occasional site that’s a crazy experiential art piece but it seems a lot of people are really thinking about keeping it minimal and highly functional, or at least I am. My favorite sites are the ones that make getting the information I need clear and easy.

I also see a lot of indie bands using platforms like Blogger and Tumblr as their sites which is an approach I think is great. It costs nothing and maximizes artist participation. If your whole site is a blog and you don’t post anything interesting, no one is reading your site, so artists have to stay on it with the updates. It seems really up front and honest to me. What I also like about this is it allows you to easily mix in marketing messages with more interesting personal content, which seems to work much better than having an all marketing copy all the time approach. Again, not for everyone, but I like this approach.

If an artist had $5000 to spend on a site and marketing, how would you recommend they spend that money?

You can do a lot with $5,000. I bet most artists don’t have that much to spend. But say $5k is what you have for the foreseeable future, which I think is more than enough really, at least for web based marketing. Most of what you *need* to do can be free or at least very cheap. First, I would consider building a site with Virb, which is a pretty cool new platform that costs $10 a month and allows you to get a pretty high end site up with a wide range of functionality really quickly. It also plays nice with Topspin. Otherwise, I’d consider WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, or anything cheap or free that you like using. Content management systems are kind of like “6 of one and a half dozen of the other” to me at this point.  Just pick something you can learn, that you’re comfortable using, and that allows you to make simple changes to the site.

Once I picked a platform, I’d want to make sure my site had some form of email capture, preferably one that offers a free mp3 download in exchange for an email. I’d also want to have some links on the main page, above the fold, that made it easy to get to my Facebook page and follow me on Twitter since chances are your fans spend way more time there every day than on your site. The most important parts of a site that need to be there, for me, are: a blog area, so you can have a voice, tour dates, contact info of some sort, music that can be heard, links to other important pages on the web and then a way to buy your music and merch, preferably sold directly to your fans. If you’re clever, you’ll incorporate some way for people to share your music with others too. I think if you cover these bases, you should be off to a pretty solid start and if you have to pay someone to set all this up for you, it’s a good use of some of your cash.

Next, I would try to play a LOT of shows. Everywhere and anywhere. I know it may seem obvious, but playing live is REALLY IMPORTANT. If you are amazing live, a fan base can’t help but grow, and if you have your shit buttoned up online, it will grow faster. But I can’t tell you how many projects I’ve seen where someone tried to put the album out before the band had the ability to set up a tour or even a run of local dates and it’s always an uphill battle to make money.

When you’re not performing live in a musical capacity, you should be doing things online. Writing blog posts about life, your career, posting photos, talking to people on Twitter and Facebook and doing things like live streaming a performance or rehearsal.

Maybe spend some money taking a few professional quality photos, shoot some short interesting videos, make some CDs to give away, make some T-shirts to sell at shows. You could print up some cheap cards that tell people if they go to your website they can download some free music. I like to have something along those lines at shows. I’d spend a small bit of cash with Tunecore or another service and get your album delivered to all the places that stream and sell music. Maybe buy some Google and Facebook search ads if you get some momentum going or have a little budget surplus. The list of things you can do that cost little or nothing is really long actually. All of this assumes you have already made a record though. If you haven’t recorded anything, spend some dough on that.

Some things I WOULD NOT spend my money on unless you have a really motivating reason to: buying offline advertising, printing expensive posters to hang around town (photo copies are fine though), making postcards with just your album art on it, build a really intense interactive website, hire a publicist (there are exceptions to this for sure, sometimes the right publicist can open doors for you, but that’s not always true), hire a radio promo indie (again, there are exceptions to everything, but it’s likely not for you if you have 5k to spend), wait to do anything until you can afford it or until everything is just perfect so that you get nothing done (especially on the web).

I guess my point is, more so now than ever, you can do a TON of shit and get REALLY far with almost nothing. Some of the most successful indie acts in the last 5 years got to be money-making bands by emailing people like Pitchfork themselves, sleeping on floors, building their own websites and touring their asses off in cheap vans. I don’t know if being brilliant and hustling will build everyone a healthy career like it did some people, but it probably can now more than ever.