Artist Spotlight is an ongoing series of posts about independent artists, labels, and marketers who use Topspin to build their businesses. These folks are combining our tools with creative ideas, clever strategies, and great art. They are a testament to our faith in the future of this industry. Here’s today’s story:
Mountain Apple Company is an independent music company that specializes in traditional Hawaiian music. For one Topspin campaign, they focused their efforts on their most well-known artist, Israel “IZ” Kamakawiwo’ole, who passed away in 1997. He is best known for his ukelele cover of “Over the Rainbow”, which has gone viral and been viewed over 30 million times.
In November 2010, before they launched his new website and Topspin-powered store, they published a page with an Email-for-Media widget giving away one of his most popular songs, “Hawai’i ’78″ along with a nicely-designed Buy Button selling the single of “Over the Rainbow”. Mountain Apple linked to this page in the description of their flagship YouTube video and published posts on IZ’s Facebook fan page. This exposure drove a flood of traffic to the site and E4M widget, which helped build their email list into a worldwide community of IZ fans.
Mountain Apple launched a new website & store for IZ on May 20th (his birthday) and emailed the thousands of fans using Topspin’s email blast feature. They also announced IZ’s new Mobile Roadie app (which included a Topspin store) in that email. The following days were their most successful to date, and they were able to track it all using Topspin and its Google Analytics integration.
These efforts are a great example of how an artist can capitalize on viral buzz. By linking to their free-download offer from the YouTube video, Mountain Apple Company harnessed the video’s exposure to increase their fan base. Their store is beautiful & well-designed, and their marketing efforts drove direct-to-fan sales around the globe.
If you’d like to learn more about this campaign, please visit the Artist Spotlight topic in our Community Forums. Mike Pooley from Mountain Apple Company will join in the discussion to answer your questions and provide more insights into this campaign.
If you’d like us to feature your campaign in our next installment, email spotlight@topspinmedia.com with your information.
