Topspin Debuts Commercial Release of End-to-End Direct-to-Fan Music Marketing Platform

Upgrade Delivers Enhanced Marketing, Management and Distribution Capabilities to a Growing Roster of Artists and Managers

AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Topspin today announced the commercial release of the company’s end-to-end direct-to-fan music marketing software. The recently upgraded Topspin software offers artists and managers more options to improve and optimize workflow around marketing, manage content, and distribute effectively in a seamlessly integrated platform. Topspin is demonstrating the software for artists and managers by appointment only this week at the 2009 South by Southwest Music conference in Austin, Texas.

“The results we've seen from artists using Topspin to market music directly to their fans have been incredible thus far”

“The results we've seen from artists using Topspin to market music directly to their fans have been incredible thus far,” said Ian Rogers, CEO at Topspin. “The commercial release of our platform builds on this success and provides artists, managers and labels with more powerful marketing tools, deeper insights to further optimize their marketing efforts, and the ability to further streamline their workflow.”

Topspin software helps artists generate direct-to-fan demand for their music using three distinct channels: viral marketing, target marketing, and direct marketing. Every aspect of the Topspin marketing suite provides data-driven feedback to help optimize an artist’s marketing strategy. In the area of viral marketing, the software boasts a new customizable widget suite that allows artists to easily promote, publish, update and sell content to their fans across the Internet. Utilizing knowledge of artist affinities and fan engagement behavior, Topspin now provides artists with a target-marketing platform to more effectively deploy paid marketing resources and increase return on investment. The Topspin software also integrates a direct marketing suite to help artists connect with newly acquired and existing fans through engaging email-for-media collection tools including Smart Group segmenting and targeting capabilities. The integrated email platform is complete with custom HTML support and performance analytics to optimize campaigns.

Artists currently using Topspin have achieved strong results. Viral distribution of streaming media widgets across countless music blogs, social network profiles, and fan sites has resulted in millions of incremental impressions. Artists have also exponentially expanded the size of their marketable fan email lists, consistently achieved email open and click thru rates of more than 50%, and achieved average transactions of more than $22.

“In the first eight weeks following the launch of the David Byrne and Brian Eno self-released record, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, the Topspin platform helped us generate direct-to-fan revenue at the very least the equivalent to what we would have expected from a label advance,” said David Whitehead, founder and CEO of Maine Road Management. “We’ve been very impressed with Topspin’s end-to-end marketing platform, and the depth of software and marketing knowledge the Topspin team offers artists and managers who are eager to develop deeper, more profitable long-term relationships directly with their fans.”

Topspin’s software solves major workflow issues for artists by combining marketing, asset management, merchandising, distribution, and data intelligence into one seamless platform. The platform’s media tools give artists more control over the management of their digital content with enhanced options for cataloging and tagging digital content including support for high-resolution video and audio formats such as HD video, FLAC and Apple Lossless. The software also allows for creative, custom bundling of digital and physical goods leading to higher price points and margins through segmented merchandising. Finally Topspin helps artists monitor the health of their business and brand through a new integrated Dashboard that displays a daily performance snapshot of direct-to-fan campaign performance on Topspin, combined with fan engagement activity on a number of music, search and retail sites such as Google, YouTube, Amazon and iLike, to name a few. A key component of the Dashboard is Topspin Rank, a performance metric that gives artists an understanding of their relative rank among similar artists in the areas of fan engagement, search and sales.

About Topspin

Founded in June 2007, Topspin is a technology-driven direct-to-fan marketing, management and distribution platform. The company is changing the business of music marketing by giving artists the tools to easily and efficiently generate demand for their music, manage their catalog and their fans, and gather insights to improve performance. Since coming out of stealth mode in June 2008, a number of artists have chosen the Topspin platform to market music directly to their fans, including Beastie Boys (Paul's Boutique reissue) David Byrne & Brian Eno (Everything That Happens Will Happen Today), The Fireman featuring Paul McCartney & Youth (Electric Arguments), Arcade Fire (Miroir Noir documentary film), Metric (Fantasies), Spinnerette, Imaad Wasif and Tom Freund to name a few. Visit www.topspinmedia.com for more information.