Topspin™

[photo courtesy Chris Carlson, CLCmusic on Twitter]

On Friday I sat on a panel at the MEIEA Conference at Berklee College of Music in Boston with Storm Gloor, Jim Griffin, and Walter McDonough about “Marketing and Distribution in a Digital World”. Much of the conversation centered around access and monetization (the “distribution” part of the above). I left entertained by my fellow panelists but thinking we’d probably done more for the audience as a group if we’d have skewed a bit more toward marketing than access.

As such, I wanted to expand on a couple of points I heard on the panel. First Walter said step one to being successful is simply being a great live band. Second, Storm and Jim both talked about establishing a direct relationship with fans rather than treating them strictly as “consumers” (Jim hypothesized “the feminization of marketing” which I couldn’t do justice to — maybe he’ll blog about it if you’re curious). Personally I think both of these things are true but how you do each is just as important, not trivial, and being re-pioneered and re-defined. I bumped into two artists this weekend who are using their opening tour slots to build new relationships with fans and wanted to tell their tale as an addendum to our panel on Friday.

[Topspin doesn’t work with either artist, yet]

I met a band called Halestorm through the magix of the Interwebz. They were in LA making their record with Howard Benson when they saw word of one of the Topspin meetups on Twitter. They came out, introduced themselves, and we talked the future of music a bit. Turns out they’re on Atlantic and touring with Shinedown. Luck would have it they were playing Boston the same weekend I was there for the conference and visiting my eldest daughter Zoe (who’s in college at MIT). After securing some heavy duty earplugs for my two year-old we rolled out to the new House of Blues across the street from Fenway to check out the show.

Halestorm knows what to do with an opening slot like the one they have now with Shinedown. They get 30 minutes every night in front of a crowd of people, most of whom have never heard of them, and they convert as many of them as possible to fans. I stood in the balcony and watched it happen. Here’s what I saw:

• Lzzy starts solo with a guitar around her neck and a mic, just singing acapella. Long notes, killer voice. She has people cheering for her before the rest of the band even walks out on stage. Before her voice gets hidden behind the rock, she lets ‘em know she can sing and you can see people are impressed straight away.
• The rest of the band appears and they tear through a few songs. It’s straight-ahead rock, on the heavy side but ready for pop radio. Everyone in the band is high-energy and engaging, even Lzzy’s brother Arejay on drums is standing up for parts of the songs and just generally being a showman.
• Mid-way through the set Lzzy announces they have a new record coming out in a few weeks but you can buy a pre-release of it now for $5 at the merch stand.
• There’s a drum solo-y part that doesn’t go on long and ends with the entire band at the front of the stage playing drums and the crowd cheering as they go crazy with it.
• During the last song Lzzy reminds them that they have their own merch stand upstairs and CDs for only $5. She also says the whole band is going to be up there after their set and that she wants to meet everyone.
• I head over to the merch stand after the show and watch their tour manager relieve the woman who runs the merch table so she can disappear into the crowd below with a box of CDs with “Halestorm CDs $5” written on it.
• The merch stand is mobbed. It’s surrounded by people and they are selling merch literally as fast as their tour manager can manage.
• The band appears (after breaking down their own stage setup) and meets and talks to as many people as possible, while helping to sell their merch.
• Free stickers list their MySpace page, etc.

Very very well done. I’m not worried about these guys at all. Even if the record doesn’t work at radio (it may) they’re going to do just fine building their audience one show at a time.

The next day I heard from another artist who found me on the Internet after one of my public speaking to blog post translations: D.A. from the Harvard-educated and on Pharrell’s label Chester French. Chester French has an opening slot on the Lady Ga Ga tour and it turns out D.A. was not only in the same town as us for a Monday night show his tour bus was parked at the same hotel we were staying at.

D.A. is one savvy guy, far from your average bear, and runs his own Salesforce.com setup to manage his band relationships with everyone from press to fans. He hands out cards every night with his URL, TellMe number, Twitter URL, and an email address that automatically adds people to his Salesforce setup.

DA Selling CDs outside of a show from Chester French on Vimeo.

Not only that, but he hustles on the street selling CDs after every show. People who saw them play, people who didn’t, passerbys, anyone who will give him $5 in exchange for a CD.

So yes, I encourage you to support these artists: follow Halestorm or D.A. on Twitter, pre-order Halestorm or Chester French’s upcoming releases. But also, watch and learn. These artists aren’t waiting for someone at the label to make them a priority (though I think both are priorities for their respective labels). They’re using the tools, doing the work, connecting directly and building real relationships with fans. That’s as close to a silver bullet as you’re going to get.

ian c rogers
Topspin

ps – I am posting this mid-flight, BOS to LAX, Virgin American Air. Wifi and laptop power in the sky! I’d like to say it feels futuristic, but really it just makes the past feel primitive. For anyone who is curious what the bandwidth is like, here’s the result of a speed test.

We were pleased to see some good pick up of this week’s announcement on TechDirt this week, but we were disappointed to see our position misconstrued as “Topspin can’t/won’t help the little guy”.

Those who know me know my personal tastes and anyone who reads this blog know we work with a lot of bands with smaller audiences because they’ve seen me ramble on about Imaad Wasif and White Denim. There are many more but I invite you to check out Les Blanks, Neal Casal, Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey, AI, Ben Taylor, The Old Ceremony, or Wendy and Lisa.

The honest truth is that who is using Topspin currently is a bit ad hoc, gated by how many hours we have in our day and how many people we think we can help be successful at the moment. As we mentioned this is ramping up, but still limited. Sorry about that. We appreciate your patience. We have even established a mailing list for *all* artists to come and share marketing ideas. Just mail us to get added. I assure you that our passion and interest lies in bands of all sizes. Compare that with solutions like Echo Music or even Sparkart, both of whom have a self-professed interest in “established” artists only. Our current limitations are practical ones, not philosophical ones. Be patient with us and we will get there. Our goal is to be a successful, long-term business.

Hearing Imaad Wasif and The Drones thank Topspin from the stage “for all your support” this week was refutation enough in my book but if you’d like a little more, check out this comment left on TechDirt by Joe Purdy’s manager:

Hello,

Nice article except that I think that possibly you may not know that Top Spin DOES work with smaller artists. Not just Byrne or Beasties.

Have you ever heard of Joe Purdy? HELL NO you haven’t or you would know he used Topspin to launch his 10th album this week. Ok and I manage him so this is also a shamess plug as well but the point is that we’ve been working within Topspin’s philosophy for a few years now. Selling direct to fans without a label. His catalog has sold over 800,000 tracks on Itunes in the US alone.

When I heard about Topspin I went over to the office and they showed me what they had built and I crapped my pants. The platform is everything I was doing but on steroids. It’s true that they aren’t picking up every single artist under the sun out there. That’s for companies who build ugly widgets. They are picking up artists who have a growing base or artists who can expand their already successful base. I think that will set them apart from companies that pop up every 3 months with a Ralph Kramden idea to save the music business.

Joe Purdy’s new album sold about 500 downloads in the first 24 hours via Topspin. I was able to release it 2 hours after Joe finished his cover art and approved the mastered audio. His fans knew that from the email that we sent to them and they felt special! They knew that they had it immediately and felt empowered. AWESOME! Word of mouth, instant back end info on who is buying and where, direct email thank you to the fan, viral player that spreads our store across the web, super distribution, more fans, I love it!!!

Check out what I’m talking about. Buy the new album, hell buy the other 9 albums direct from Joe Purdy Records. http://joepurdy.com/lastclockonthewall.html

Thank you for reading my ramble.

Brian Klein

Thanks again for your patience and support,
ian c rogers
Topspin

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

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

We’ve been so busy lately trying to get our acts together for SXSW, we nearly forgot to update you on all the awesome bands using our platform for a variety of releases. Sorry! To make it up to you, we’ll give you some free PBR and great music if you swing by our cosponsored daytime showcase at SXSW this Wednesday – Friday.

To start off, Yeah Yeah Yeahs had the misfortune of having their album leak over a month before the intended street date. The folks over at Interscope were quick to react, and our Artist Services team was more than happy to help out, turning around an official digital direct-to-fan release in about a week. All is not lost when an album leaks — there are still lots of fans who want to pay for their music, especially when purchasing directly from the artist, and some of the fans who downloaded the songs elsewhere still came back to the band’s website to pick up physical copies (I know I was one of the nearly 50% of buyers who chose vinyl as part of their purchase). We’ve said it before, but fans will buy music if you give them desirable options and quality content – Yeah Yeah Yeahs have certainly done both.

Speaking of “Yeahs,” Clap Your Hands Say Yeah recently used Topspin to capture an audience from a traditional TV appearance. They premiered a new song, “Statues,” on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and offered up a free download of the demo track on their website immediately following the program — Jimmy Fallon even thought the idea was cool enough to plug it before they played. We always encourage artists to use our platform in conjunction with all their other marketing efforts, rather than thinking of it as an exclusive channel, and this is a prime example. Again, doesn’t hurt that they offer quality content, too.

Keeping with the young and hip theme, Vice Records recently put out a couple records using our platform. They’ve offered up Black Lips new album “200 Million Thousand” for free full-album streaming, and the download is a steal for $8 ($12 if you want the physical CD). Even more recently, Japanese Motors released an EP with a couple acoustic tracks and a demo, again with full streams, and again at a bargain price – $1.50.

It’s not all new releases – folk singer Joe Purdy and rock goddess Bif Naked have released their back catalogs on their websites, each capturing added fan engagement in anticipation of a new album. In shorter form, She Wants Revenge posted an EP that was previously only available on tour, and Modest Mouse’s Tom Peloso released a folksy EP (with definite hints of Modest Mouse) on his site.

The releases will be fast and furious in the coming weeks and months, so we can’t even hope to keep up with them all. For our part, we’ll keep building our direct to fan music marketing platform, and hope it helps the bands reach you. We’re deeply honored to work with each and every one of these artists, and look forward to helping more great music find its way to your ears. Stay tuned.

Ty White
Topspin

We’ve been slaving away on the latest version of the Topspin platform (more to come next week at SXSW) but we’re planning to come up for a little air Wednesday, March 11 for some good drinks and conversation our usual haunt, Bar Chloe (1449 Second St., Santa Monica, CA 90401), on Wednesday this go-round. We’ve got some friends and new additions to the Topspin family in town that we’d love for you to meet too (a few you may already know): Steve Patch, Paul Heck, Brad Barrish, and Andrew Mains. We’ll start around 9pm some come by, say hello and join us for a drink or two.

Planning on joining? RSVP on Facebook here.

Hope to see you there!

Topspin is hitting SXSW full force this year, nearly a full week of back-to-back music and meetings in Austin, a couple of press releases, a panel, and maybe even a few lines at Mabel Davis Park.

We’d like to see YOU there. We’re co-sponsoring Little Radio’s music fest at Red Eyed Fly, noon to 6pm Weds March 18th through Friday March 20th. Topspin team will be in the house quite a bit over those three days, but we’ll be there FOR SURE for rock and meetup 4-6pm on Wednesday and Friday so come on through and say hello! Just don’t interrupt me when The Drones are playing, please…

On Thursday at 3:30pm I’m moderating a panel called “Do A 360 Deal With Yourself” and your attendance is required. Please mark your calendar and join me for a discussion with artists Amanda Fucking Palmer (Dresden Dolls) and John Wesley Harding, William Morris’ SuzAnn Brantner, and managers Michael McDonald and Chris Moon. We’ve been practicing and have a dance routine ready to end the panel with. You don’t want to miss this.

All week long we’ll be meeting with artists, managers, labels, and the like demo’ing the latest version of the Topspin software. We’re already pretty booked up but if you’d like us to try to find time to meet with you just drop us a note and we’ll see what we can do. If we can’t book a specific time, please just come by Red Eyed Fly between 4pm and 6pm Weds or Friday, say hello after my panel, or stop one of us with the Topspin t-shirts on the street (or at the skate park).

You can also keep decent track of Topspin whereabouts via Twitter. Here are Twitter handles of those of us from Topspin heading down to Austin:

Brad Barrish – whatevrnvrmind
Gary Brotman – garyzero
Jason Kadlec – jasonkadlec
Bob Moczydlowsky – bobmoz
Steve Patch – thetapeleader
Shamal Ranasinghe – shamalman
Ian Rogers – iancr
Valerie Syme – valeriesyme
Ty White – tywhite

Oh and don’t forget our friends from Foundry! They’ll be in town, too, along with the Twitterless Peter Gotcher and Tim Haley.

Ryan McIntyre – ryan_mcintyre
Jason Mendelson – jasonmendelson

Stalk away!

Below is the band schedule at the Little Radio/Topspin/Nudie Jeans day party shindig dance-a-thon. I will personally try to be on-hand to catch White Denim, Phosphorescent, FREELAND, Amanda Palmer, Imaad Wasif, and, of course, The Drones. Lots of other great stuff there, too. Come hang out and see it all.

WEDS MAR 18
12:40-01:00 The Upside Down
01:20-02:00 Whispertown2000
01:50-02:20 Amanda Palmer
02:20-03:00 Evangelicals
02:50-03:20 Youngmond Grand
03:20-04:00 Von Bondies
03:50-04:20 Dawes
04:20-05:00 Megafaun
04:50-05:20 Tallest Man on Earth
05:20-06:00 The Drones

THURS MAR 19
12:30-01:30 All Star Austin Super Bloody Mary Jam hosted by Jack G from Tenlons Fort
01:20-02:00 J Tillman
01:50-02:20 Imaad Wasif
02:20-03:00 Afternoons
02:50-03:20 FREELAND
03:20-04:00 Alberta Cross
03:50-04:20 Rumspringa
04:20-05:00 Viva Voce
04:50-05:20 Loch Lomond
05:20-06:00 Port O’brien

FRI MAR 20
12:40-01:00 Matt Ellis
01:20-02:00 Spindrift
01:50-02:20 Pity Party
02:20-03:00 Great Northern
02:50-03:20 MAdM
03:20-04:00 Horse Feathers
03:50-04:20 Henry Clay People
04:20-05:00 Phosphorescent
04:50-05:20 Restaurant
05:20-06:00 White Denim

See you in Austin,
ian c rogers
Topspin

Not sure what else I can say about Metric that hasn’t already been said, they’re a band so good they’ve had to try to stay small. Personally I love a band with indie ethos and broad appeal, and they don’t come along every day. Metric are the real deal. But don’t take my word for it, click play on the above and see what you think.

If you like it, check out the pre-order that went live on their site today. Buy now and get an immediate download of the single, a B-side, an acoustic track, and a killer cover of what is probably my favorite song from The Wall, and then expect an email with a link to the full record on the day of release.

Also, please click the “Share on Facebook” link in the lower right of the pre-order page to add the Metric media player to your Facebook wall. Perhaps it’s no surprise a noticeable percentage of artist sales are coming direct from Facebook even though we haven’t invested a lot of effort there. This share flow is just a first step toward more meaningful integrations into Facebook — not just “add an app that no one uses” but simple ways for you to send music from the Web to your friends on Facebook. Try it out, it’s very liquid. Two clicks to your Facebook wall, then easy to mail to others and two more clicks for anyone to take it from their inbox or your wall to someone else’s inbox or their own wall.

We’re incredibly proud to be part of the “hand-picked” group of people mentioned in this interview. It’s an honor to be included. Thanks for having us along for the ride.

Oh and apparently the kids love it — my daughter off at college asks me for a copy of the album DAILY. What’s it say about how protective I am of the music we’re working with that I wouldn’t give it to her? She called me yesterday to say she BOUGHT THE SINGLE ON ITUNES so she could open her radio show with it last night. Stream Zoe’s show on MIT’s WMBR here (starts at 4:16 minutes into the stream). If she’d have waited one day she could have downloaded the single and oh so much more…

ian c rogers
Topspin