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When the Pixies, the reunited stars of 1980s alt-rock, decided recently to play a special show in Los Angeles, they wanted to make sure their biggest local followers were invited first.
So last Thursday morning, the band sent e-mail messages to 8,031 fans with Southern California ZIP codes, announcing the show and alerting them that “tickets are on sale RIGHT NOW.”
All 1,200 tickets for the show, at the Music Box on Nov. 19, were sold in about an hour, said Richard Jones, the band’s manager.
The rush was a testimony to the loyalty of Pixies fans. But to manage the whole process online — including reaching out to a small subset of its mailing list and selling the tickets itself — the group turned to Topspin Media, one of a handful of technology companies that are transforming the way musicians do business by letting them market directly to their audiences.
The “direct to fan” connection has existed in various forms since the earliest days of the Web. But musicians and managers say that only in recent years, with the rise of companies like Topspin and its competitors — among them Bandcamp, FanBridge and ReverbNation — have the tools become sophisticated enough to run all aspects of a band’s online business. Among the services are selling tracks, running fan clubs and calculating royalty payments.
Ian Rogers, Topspin’s chief executive, says the ability of artists to efficiently market themselves online represents the next major phase of the digital music revolution, after programs like Pro Tools made it possible to record an album on a laptop and iTunes made download sales viable.
“The fundamental premise of the company is, if the production and distribution of music have already been disrupted by the Internet, how is technology going to serve marketing and retail?” said Mr. Rogers, who rides a skateboard and has a tattoo of the logo for NeXT Computer, the company Steven P. Jobs founded after being fired from Apple in the 1980s.
Topspin, which was founded in 2007 and operated by invitation until it opened to wide membership in March, offers bands customizable Web widgets to sell recordings, tickets and merchandise, as well as a detailed back-end accounting system. In July it also began working with the Sundance Institute to distribute independent films. Topspin charges 15 percent of sales plus an annual fee, and has signed up 15,000 acts, fewer than most of its competitors.
But Topspin, whose office in Santa Monica, Calif., is crammed with client memorabilia — a heavy Paul McCartney box set over here, a rack of custom-painted skateboards over there — is said to offer the most technologically advanced direct-to-fan system. And it has developed a specialty of bundling physical goods with downloads.
The company encourages bands to give songs away, wagering that curious fans will come back to buy more lucrative products like T-shirts or deluxe editions that can be combined at various price levels.
The company’s sales data seem to support that philosophy. Even with plenty of $2 videos and $10 posters for sale, the average transaction on Topspin brings in $26; when tickets are involved, the average is $88.
The filmmaker Kevin Smith (“Clerks,” “Red State”), who has an extensive merchandising business, says he believes the service gives artists more control than was ever possible before.
“Topspin helps you understand things that 20 years ago you would have had to rely on people in a large building wearing suits to do for you,” Mr. Smith said. “They don’t run your business for you. They just give you the technology so you can run it yourself.”
Mr. Rogers, 39, who got his start running the Beastie Boys’ fan site in college and was later recruited by the band to work on its nascent Web operation (the group is now one of Topspin’s biggest clients), calls the strategy of combining digital and physical goods “rebundling.”
It is a remedy, he says, to one of the music industry’s most persistent problems: the “unbundling” and subsequent devaluation of the album as a result of consumers’ ability to download a single track rather than the more profitable full CD.
“What the Internet has really allowed is not a move from physical to digital, but consumer choice,” Mr. Rogers said.
For thousands of artists, ranging from acts on major labels to those that handle their business by themselves, direct-to-fan marketing has become essential. Last year, for example, the singer Amanda Palmer employed Bandcamp to release an entire album of Radiohead cover songs featuring the ukulele, letting fans set the price (the minimum was 84 cents, to cover royalties). She made $15,000 in three minutes.
The Pixies had a peculiar situation. The band was famous but without a record label, and since it largely missed the rise of the Internet — it broke up in 1993 and reunited in 2004 — it had no official Web site. After giving away four songs, the group compiled 266,000 e-mail addresses, Mr. Jones said. It used that data for two shows in London last year in which it sold tickets through Topspin and then scanned them at the door using the company’s iPhone app.
“It feels like a totally new way of doing things,” Mr. Jones said.
But there are also some growing concerns in the industry about the reliance on direct-to-fan systems, and about the financial viability of those companies.
Topspin is not yet profitable, Mr. Rogers said, though “we wrote checks for many millions of dollars to artists last year.” And the strongest criticism of Topspin among artists is one that Mr. Rogers readily acknowledges: compared with its competitors, Topspin is complex and can be difficult to learn. He says he is working to address that criticism.
Midem, the organization behind the music industry’s biggest trade fair, two weeks ago began serializing a study called “The Real Cost of Direct to Fan,” which lays out situations in which artists are better off selling items on the road or through traditional retailers.
“It needs to be done carefully,” said David Riley of Good Lizard Media, a digital music consulting firm that produced the report. “There needs to be a proper cost-benefit analysis of what an artist wants to achieve. But if done well and shrewdly, there is no downside.”
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