Topspin Media

» see topspinmedia.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Topspin never had a consumer login, so if you encountered it at all you encountered it as somebody's checkout page. A band you liked sold a record bundled with a poster and a download code off their own site, and the software running that transaction was Topspin. That was the entire proposition: give an artist the tools a label had, so that the artist could sell to people directly and keep the list of who bought.

Peter Gotcher and Shamal Ranasinghe founded it in Santa Monica in 2007. Gotcher had co-founded Digidesign and helped put Pro Tools into every studio on earth, so this was not a first-time founder guessing at the music business. Ian Rogers ran it as CEO, coming out of Nullsoft and Yahoo Music, and he had the vocabulary for the moment: the industry was not going to be rebuilt by whoever replaced the CD, it was going to be rebuilt by whoever owned the relationship with the buyer.

It worked for a while. Billboard named it Indie Visionary of the Year in 2008. It added ticketing in 2010 and sold out Pixies shows at The Troxy in London through it. It opened to the general public in March 2011 after years of invitation-only access, was picked as one of four partners for YouTube's merch store integration that October, and signed on with MTV's Artists platform in March 2012. Paul McCartney, Eminem, Linkin Park, Arcade Fire and Sigur Ros all had stores on it, alongside roughly thirty-five thousand smaller accounts.

Then it was sold twice in six weeks and never mattered again. Beats Music announced the acquisition on 4 March 2014, with Ian Rogers, by then running Beats Music himself, writing the blog post about buying his old company. Within about a month Beats had sold Topspin to Transom Capital Group, which already owned the merchandise firms BandMerch and Cinderblock. In May 2014 Apple bought Beats for three billion dollars.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

The direct-to-fan pitch of 2008 to 2012 was a real argument and Topspin made it better than anyone. If a musician sold a hundred dollar box set to two thousand people, that beat a hundred thousand streams by an amount nobody had to explain. What the platform gave you was the bundling logic and the fulfillment plumbing underneath it, so that the store on your own domain behaved like a store rather than like a PayPal button.

What it never solved was who pays for the software. Artists at the top of the list did enough volume to justify the fee. The thirty-five thousand accounts underneath them mostly did not, and the whole business sat on the small number of large customers, which is a fragile place for an infrastructure company to sit.

~ bought and sold in a month ~

Read the 2014 sequence in order and it is hard to see Topspin as anything other than a rounding error inside a much larger deal. Beats Music was months from being sold to Apple. Its CEO acquired the company he used to run, and the asset was passed to a private equity buyer with existing merch holdings almost immediately afterward, which is the shape of a team acquisition where the product is inventory rather than the point.

Transom then did nothing with it for six years. Hypebot's obituary is blunt about that: the new owners neither updated nor promoted the platform while competitors that did both took the market. Bandcamp built the same thing for a wider audience and kept building it. Shopify made a generic store cheap enough that nobody needed a music-specific one.

~ the quiet part ~

There is no shutdown notice for Topspin, no farewell page, no press release. The last capture of topspinmedia.com that returns a working homepage is 12 May 2020. On 10 June 2020 Hypebot reported the site had been offline for several days and that neither Topspin nor BandMerch had answered its questions. When the archive picks the domain back up in December it is not a music platform anymore.

The domain today serves a Korean-language casino page, which is what happens to an address with thirteen years of links pointing at it from band sites that have also stopped being updated.

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