Topspin and the Future of Music Marketing

I’ve had the pleasure of working with the fine folks at Topspin Media since I joined the board of the company when Foundry Group invested in Topspin’s Series B in 2008, and I’ve been fortunate to know Topspin’s co-founders, Peter Gotcher and Shamal Ranasinghe since the late ’90s.

Topspin was founded with the premise that the key to any artist’s success in the digital age will hinge on an artist’s ability to engage directly with their fans and build a meaningful and authentic artistic and commerical relationship with them. Topspin provides sophisticated artist-focused and data-driven tools to enable artists and their management to run their businesses online.

Now that Topspin has been working with hundreds of artists and has a couple years of real-world experience with their platform in production, they’ve built up enough data to start to share some of their findings about managing, measuring and marketing with data. Shamal gave an excellent presentation at the Midem Conference in Cannes last week, and the deck is packed full of Topspin’s learnings about best practices for running direct-to-fan campaigns.

Here’s the presentation, which is well worth a read for anyone interested in the latest thinking on music marketing in digital age. For a more in-depth discussion of these slides, check out Shamal’s post on the Topspin blog.