Digital Distribution is Going To Get One Step Easier for the DIY Artist

Digital distribution is going to get one step easier later this summer for the DIY artist. As you probably know here at Make It In Music we completely advocate 'direct to fan' marketing and love the facilities that Topspin have to offer artists, a comprehensive tool kit that help them to promote their art, connect with their fans, and build a solid business.

Well now we hear that Topspin are teaming up with Tunecore. Tunecore is a digital distribution company that has deals with iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, simfy, iHeartRadio and a whole bunch of other services around the world.

The two companies compliment each other perfectly, meaning you will be able to have your music auto-delivered from Topspin to TuneCore or from TuneCore to Topspin without having to re-upload.

This takes the pain out of numerous uploads in different formats and re-entering metadata and codes for both companies. And the data from your direct to fan sales at Topspin are merged with the data at Tunecore so you can see where you are with sales in a single glance.

Check out what Topspin has to offer the DIY artist here.

For more information on this merger you should go here.

Links

www.topspinmedia.com

www.tunecore.com

 

Topspin and RootMusic sync up a beauty!

I use Topspin and RootMusic BandPage for my clients.

When Topspin announced this yesterday, I added a New BandPage (from scratch) to a client's Facebook Fan Page and had it installed and with a Topspin store selling 10 different records / CD's / downloads within 10 minutes!

Sure it needs tweaking and more doing to it, but, that, my dears, is the future!

Read the post on Topspin's blog or watch the video below. In short, this shows why Topspin are at the leading edge of Direct To Fan - sharing API and looking to offer the best functionality for promoting, marketing and selling your music.

I know I sound like their salesman - I promise I'm not! - but it works for me.

Someone asked me yesterday if I didn't think it was too expensive. No, I don't. I come from an old school background where my artists were paid maybe 15% of record sales. So paying $9.99 per month and 15% to the distributor and keeping 85% feels pretty good to me!

Watch the video here.

Talent plus 'direct to fan' ensures success

Just go and read this post from Bob Lefsetz.

He lists the people he thinks are the 10 most powerful right now in Music - and tells us why. He also looks at those that aren't as powerful as you'd think.

His conclusion is that talent and 'direct to fan' is the answer - oh, how odd, that's what we're teaching!

The future is in the hands of the public.  Who will follow the leads of individuals utilizing tech tools to build infrastructure.  I’d love to tell you exactly where we’re going, but I don’t know.  But one thing I’m sure of is the future will not look like the past. Those in the past have blown it by insisting the public stay in the past.  The public loves digital files, wants tons of them, for nowhere near a buck a track, yet the labels still cling to an old model.  The future is a new model.  Based on access.  Monetizing in ways heretofore unseen.  It’s about marrying Richard Russell’s acts with Topspin exploitation.  All the while charging the public to hear everything at their fingertips.  We’ll get there.  And most of the people who were powerful before Napster will be ancient history.  Some of those who are powerful today will be history. But those who make the music will survive.  If they’ve put in their 10,000 hours, if what they create resonates with the public.  You don’t have to make what everyone else does.  But when you get it right, you need a Coran Capshaw or an insightful twentysomething to navigate a career where you make every decision thinking about your audience, not your wallet.  There’s plenty of money..if your music is great and you’re credible and you know that the old institutions, radio and television and labels, mean less than ever before.

Read it here.

 

The 3 most important platforms for musicians

Are:

Email

Twitter

Facebook Shares

.....according to Topspin.

This is a short post that sets out the direct to fan specialist's view, backed up by their data, that those are the three most important platforms artists can use to drive direct sales. Note that it's about sales and they also give a large nod to YouTube for engagement.

It's also refreshing that their advice is to spend all your attention on developing your art and finding people who can do the marketing for you. Clearly, your material needs to be great for any marketing effort to be worth the bother.

But, read the piece and don't ignore their data and the reasons. Email creates sales.

If you're not running an artist website that offers free tracks in return for an email.....you are an idiot!

Read the piece here.

A Direct-To-Fan Campaign in detail

On the exceptional We All Make Music blog there is a review of the competition for a grant from Topspin to use in a forthcoming Direct To Fan campaign.

It's a good piece of itself, but it also links to one of the proposals that ended up winning the grant, and that's interesting, because it has all of the ideas of a real world band that you know the experts from Topspin have rated as likely to succeed.

There ought to be some ideas in there that you can use!

Read the WAM piece here.

And go direct to the D2F campaign outline here.

Topspin is Open!

Last post for a while about this - which I genuinely believe will turn out to be a milestone.

So, go and have a look at the site and see what you think.

Hypebot has a good rundown of the costs and features here - Hypebot on Topspin.

And I got sent this link from Topspin today - I think it's meant for existing users, so shhhhh!

Worth having a look at it as it shows you around inside Topspin at all the functionality.

Be ready to hit pause though as it has six videos on a single page that all start at once!

See Inside Topspin here.

Direct to Fan for all - Topspin for everybody

I've been using Topspin for a little over a year and have learnt a huge amount about the platform and also the methods that work when you are trying to build a two-way relationship with your fans.

Let's just say that DTF is going to work for you if you already have some momentum and, crucially, if you, the artist, get involved and want to see it work.

If you leave it to the 'manangement' or the 'office', you might as well not bother!

That said, Topspin looks set to be 'the Daddy' when it becomes available to all artists this month.

Eric Hebert has written a great piece about the opportunities that this presents to all artists.

Well it looks like Topspin’s up coming public release just might be the real solution I’m looking for. Now, I’ve been keeping an eye on Topspin for years now, and have a kind of love/hate relationship with the service. I LOVE the widgets and overall look of the tools they have, they are very well designed, fast loading, look very customizable, have no branding whatsoever, etc.

The HATE part comes from simply not being allowed to use the service, as I’ve never had a client with an established fan base to meet the Topspin requirement. For years Topspin seemed to only cater their service to somewhat established acts. In a way I guess I was always just jealous that I wasn’t established enough to be in the cool kids club.

Read the whole piece here.

Is Topspin that good?

Yes!

But, I'm still waiting for the killer platform. Topspin is not as good as an email system as the best (such as Aweber). It needs better automated follow-ups (known as autoresponders) and better segmentation so that you can follow up with people who do or don't open your emails. Plus, you have to enter much of your music's metadata to use Topspin so it would make sense if it could distribute to iTunes and other digital stores as well. And thirdly, it doesn't auto-integrate with Facebook like RootMusic or DamntheRadio. It would be great if it did!

I reckon Topspin knows about these three things and will maybe bring them in.

If not, then that's the killer platform that we're waiting for - Topspin plus those three!

Direct to Fan best practice

Following on from our piece about the Topspin presentation on direct to fan I checked their blog yesterday and found this interview with a digital marketing guy at a major management firm.

In the piece he talks about his experiences with Topspin but also covers a huge amount of stuff that amounts to a 'best practice' guide in direct to fan music marketing.

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.

Read the post here.

A step by step guide to online music marketing

This is truly awesome.

READ EVERY WORD!

@iancrogers who is the main man at @topspinmedia just gave this talk at the New Music Seminar and posted it on their blog.

I love Topspin and use it daily.

This post is an outline of how they think artists should approach direct to fan online marketing.

On top of that, they have announced that they are going to make Topspin available to all artists in March.

This is a big deal.

Go and read it all now.

 

Topspin vs Bandcamp - my take

Image by Penningtron - not this Topspin, although it looks good too!

Bob Lefsetz has been writing about the differences between Bandcamp and Topspin and whether one or the other is better for artists to use to run their direct-to-fan activity.

It was inspired by this great article on Bandcamp in the LA Times. But, in asking the question Bob drew praise and negativity about both platforms into his Twitter stream and inbox. Which you can see in the article here - Bob's article on Topspin vs Bandcamp.

Cathy Pellow of Sargent House tweeted this:

@Lefsetz this is what i think of @Bandcamp - http://sargenthouse.bandcamp.com been on their since early days. Topspin is too expensive.

Ian Rogers of Topspin responded thusly:

@sargenthouse Actually we’re not more expensive than Bandcamp. Give me a call to discuss. /cc @Lefsetz

And in response to Tim Luckow’s tweet:

@Lefsetz With Bandcamp there’s no need to use Topspin.

Ian said this:

@TimLuckow I respectfully disagree, there are many features in Topspin which they don’t offer. Our March launch will show ‘em off. @Lefsetz

So, what do we think? Well, I think he's missed the real issue a bit!

I have way, way more experience with Topspin than I do with Bandcamp and I love it. It has some annoying limitations - particularly in postage handling for physical sales! - and is a bit buggy. BUT, it FULLY integrates your media (music, videos, products) with email, and (to an extent) facebook and Twitter - and for me that makes it the killer app.

Bandcamp is awesome - simple and very slick. It will collect email, but not in the same software suite with linked data - and that, for me, is a major flaw.

In Topspin, you can see your fans individually, which emails they've clicked, how much they've spent, what tracks they've downloaded - all in one place.

I think Topspin will dominate the space for commercially successful artists and labels who want the simple solution. The technical shortcomings of Bandcamp in a few areas will be overcome - they'll add to it. Or, if you are a bit tech-y you can add interoperability easily enough.

Don't dismiss Bandcamp! We have paired it with Aweber which works fine for the email side but it's just a bit more effort.

A key factor in deciding is that we have found that all the artists that we do it with want the centralised one-stop simple solution. Game over.

But there's another option that just doesn't have the muscle that Topspin has, but actually is very close in concept and execution and will grow with any artist - Nimbit. Well worth a look.

Given the option though, I go for Topspin for direct-to fan - including email list management and Believe Digital for digital distribution - but that's a different story!

Topspin training by Berklee

I took the 'Online Music Marketing with Topspin' course with Berklee before beginning my first direct to fan campaigns for my acts.

Mike King is a great tutor and the course is excellent.

I'd go as far as to say that if you are an independent artist wanting to use Topspin you aren't going to get the best out of it unless you do this course.

We’ve been teaching the Topspin course at Berkleemusic.com for just under a year, and personally, it’s been one of the more rewarding things that I’ve been involved in. To get emails like the following from online students really reinforces the fact that we are doing something positive and immediately applicable for musicians and their career:

Subject: Brian Ray Pre-Sale + Topspin Marketing = Success!!

Read Mike's post about it on the Topspin blog.

Membership sites for VIP fans are a must

We've been using direct-to-fan marketing techniques for a while using the brilliant Topspin platform.

It rocks.

They've just updated the software so that it automatically allows the sale of membership packages to fans.

This week we’re adding a new product type, VIP Access, to the catalog. VIP Access allows you to sell or give away membership to a group will receive special access to offers (early access to tickets?) or content (streaming, downloads, etc).

Whether you use Topspin or not, check out their announcement as it covers ideas of how and what to do when offering memberships to music fans.