Ian Rogers, the former GM of Yahoo Music, has finally taken music startup TopSpin Media out of stealth mode. The new company will offer a marketing software platform for music artists to maximize their fanbase and brand exposure.
Rogers, who was the GM of Yahoo Music until April 2008, is one of the few beacons of common sense in a digital music industry seemingly intent on shoving bad products down consumers’ throats. In October 2007 Rogers addressed a number of music excutives where he explained that consumers aren’t willing to adopt inferior products (namely subscription music services).
I won’t let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience. I will tell Yahoo! to give the money they were going to give me to build awesome media applications to Yahoo! Mail or Answers or some other deserving endeavor. I personally don’t have any more time to give and can’t bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life’s too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out.
Yahoo subsequently sold its subscription music service to Rhapsody and acquired FoxyTunes, a Firefox-based plugin that lets users control music players from their browser. Then, during the middle of Yahoo Music’s apparent rebirth, Rogers resigned from the company to become CEO of Topspin Media in April 2008.
TopSpin Media describes itself as a technology company (not a “marketing services” company) aimed at helping artists better market themselves. For now TopSpin’s platform is only available to a few select artists, but the company plans to eventually open it to “anyone who would like to make a living from their art”. You can read more about the company on its first blog post here.
Nice to see this live. Best of luck, Ian.
Good for Ian to haver the balls to speak up and go for innovation instead of the ultra quick exit to investment ’success.’
Ian must have sensed that Microsoft deal is not going to materialize, hence left Yahoo! early.
Good luck, Ian
Such a sick logo.
ian is cool, but these sites are a dime a dozen
Ian’s a complete class act and you’ll be hard pressed to find someone more passionate about music or musicians. I wish him the best.
I’m very curious what the marketing technology is, since his examples where all distribution related.
Wikipedia does not recognize ‘this’ Ian
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Rogers
beep!
Good Picture! Sounds like something interesting in being cooked at Topspin. Love to see more people evangelize this segment, specifically people like Ian.
later
SG
Such a sick logo.
@5 What other sites? Examples? Not challenging… really looking for input.
Although its difficult to understand what Topspin is exactly (why are they so cryptic about it?), it sounds like a ReverbNation clone to me. Higher profile founder for sure. But lots of catching up to do (I think RN has something like 200,000 artists already using their marketing platform). Competition in this space will only do good things for indie Artists and labels (I’m a little bit of both), so its nice to see another company getting in the mix. Hopefully it won’t be too long before they let us little guys try it out….. hint hint.
@13 Are you a indie artist? Have a band? What is it called and where are you folks located?
sganguly@yahoo.com
I know this is mostly about music but, isn’t Deviant Art.com the same thing? I’m sure there is room for everybody though, but I wonder about Topspin and how it plans on being different yet serving the same population of people (artists).
Thanks to TechCrunch for the shoutout to Topspin! You will all be learning much more about the company in the future–it’s REALLY exciting and innovative stuff. One correction though (a mistake Billboard made as well): it’s spelled Topspin not TopSpin.
@16 Do you work for Topspin? Seems like you know a lot about the company’s strategy.
SG
Great idea, best of luck to Ian, seems like a brilliant idea, can’t wait til its available for all customer use, my collegues band could really use this.
@14,
Are you here trolling for bands to try out your site?