The Nerds Are On To Something

Self-proclaimed “data nerd” and Topspin Media CEO Ian Rogers recently conducted an interview with Wired Magazine, which in my opinion is one of the only magazines still worth reading regularly these days.

It starts off somewhat evangelical of the Santa Monica based company that is one of a few that provide innovative new services for independent artists, but Rogers makes some crucial points very clear.

First, the point that making music easier to share freely not only gets it into more ears, but gives you valuable marketing data to help close more hard sales:

Everything that we build is super-distributable. Even the free track for email widget, which a lot of our artists use. And a big moment for me, even though it’s really simple, was seeing that free track for email widget show up on kids’ blogs. You know, ‘hey, new Metric track. Come get it.’ And it wasn’t you know, here’s [a] YouSendIt link, it was ‘just put your email address here.’ It’s super easy, it’s good for the band. And then being able to look and go, ‘wow, this blog over here is driving more sign-ups than my own site! Maybe I should call that person up. Maybe we should do our next 7″ release through them first.’ You know, really obvious stuff. But without the data, pretty impossible to get your arms around.

Towards the end, Rogers discusses a conversation he had with MGMT’s manager, pointing out the pitfalls of a success path that starts with radio play and ends with iTunes- the band forfeits a valuable relationship by not looking beyond the immediate purchase.

Worth watching if you or someone you know is in a band trying to get their heads around the current state of the industry from a reasonable perspective.