What is Topspin?
Kadlec Consulting is Topspin Certified. If you don’t know what Topspin is, please check out the Topspin site at:
http://www.topspinmedia.com.
The quick run down is this. Topspin is a professional level tool set for:
- marketing your band
- interacting with fans
- selling art (aka product, merch, downloads etc)
- providing data so you can optimize your performance
Here are a few specific things I think make Topspin the top choice for accomplishing the goal of making direct to fan a part of your web presence and a part of your business.
Scale:
Topspin has delivered for Eminem, The Arcade Fire, Paul McCartney and many other artists who have had a lot of fans all downloading big, high quality audio files all at the same time….without crashing or slowing down.
Having massive scale may not matter to you now but should you be so lucky to blow up in a major way like a great review on pitchfork or slash/dot and a traffic onslaught starts interacting with your media- you don’t want to miss your big chance. You want the fan’s tweets to be of the “awesome I love it” variatey not the “Fail. I couldn’t download it.” sort.
Widgets:
Templates don’t allow you to do exactly what you want, but building it all yourself can get really expensive and time consuming. And even if you could would you want to? Topspin is right in the middle of these two options. It’s ALOT better than a template, though it may take longer to set up, BUT it’s also ALOT faster than trying to build something like this from the ground up or hack in some Paypal enabled almost there solution.
Not to mention that Topspin works on a revenue share so while you may have some overhead to get the widgets plugged into your site or build a site using the widgets, it is nothing compared to what Topspin spent making these widgets and the backend to deliver the functionality! Kadlec Consulting also provides *very* reasonable rates for the web development step of deploying Topspin.
Consolidated workflow
The widgets enable marketing and commerce. Using different platforms for media players, email collection, email marketing and sales is a waste of valuable time.
Topspin’s widgets help you engage your audience and grow your email database, market to that fan base and then make the sale. You then “own” the customer. Kind of a crass thing to say, but it means that fan can now get your “new music” email instead of whatever marketing emails iTunes/Amazon etc. will send.
Google Analytics
While Topspin provides a great set of data, Google Analytics can add an additional layer of valuable information. Topspin communicates some key data to your Google Analytics account.
Instant gratification for fans
It’s such a small but important thing. Yes you could sell that CD via Paypal, then email a link to download it (keeping track of links on a spreadsheet or something?) Forget it. That won’t scale. Sell your digital or digital+physical product and get your customer something instantly.
Topspin sells some T-shirts and delivers a screen saver as the instant gratification. How cool is that? Which leads to my last reason:
Topspin is smart
If you don’t RSS the Topspin Blog I recommend it. Or head there now and check out some of CEO Ian Rogers’ posts/interviews. The Topspin team gets the challenge and opportunity of re-inventing this part of the music business. They are constantly taking a great product and making even better.
Working with Kadlec Consulting includes getting an account on Topspin.
Note that Kadlec Consulting does not negotiate the terms of the agreement you must sign before getting your Topspin account activated.
Drop a line for more information.
