I am an old man (in some circles). When I find myself on most undergraduate college campuses the days, it seems that the students have more in common with my 12 year old step son than with me. I’ve been out of college for almost 15 years now. So it was with great curiosity and mild mischievous humor , that I have entered into the hallowed halls of online course-dom by way of Berklee’s Online Music Marketing with Topspin course.

I feel a bit like Rodney Dangerfield in “Back to School”.

As CEO of a pretty well respected direct-to-fan marketing shop, our clients kinda expect us to already know quite a bit on the topics of online, social and so forth. And we do. And we pitch and deliver outstanding programs every day. So it is a bit of a running joke around the FanMail office that that I might be bit overqualified for the class… and so likely doomed to failure based on murphy’s law.

I got a C on my first assignment for not answering the whole question, “Please outline your top 10 pros and cons (5 each) of a direct-to-fan sales and marketing approach. Which traditional outlets do you think are still effective for selling and marketing your music?” I got the 10 pros and cons but skipped the question on which traditional outlets still work. Rats… the details get me every time.

But it is the dialogue that I’m most interested in. That is the good stuff. The grade is really negligible for me.

I mean the music industry sucks for open dialogue. Generally there is just too much ego and posturing and and self congratulation and fierce competition for the industry to actually openly discuss what works or doesn’t work in their marketing methodologies. It is interesting. If you go to any number of main stream “corporate” marketing conferences often you find presenters (one person showing a case study or telling a real story of success) or round tables (open dialogue with the audience and a moderator). But in the music industry it is all about “The Panel” (a group of hand picked experts who are really there to propel their own agendas).

So I’m looking to Academics for dialogue and I applaud Ian and Shamal and team for bringing it into a forum where such things can hopefully thrive. My fear of course is that the promise of open dialogue here could quickly be clouded by the marketing agenda. We shall see.

I’m also interested in the Topspin platform. I don’t think that it is akin to the second coming of Christ as the hype would lead us to believe, but I do think that it is a game changer and puts some pretty powerful tools in the hands of artists and their team. At FanMail, we are hoping to expand our programming over the next months to execute services for our clients on the Topspin platform. This is a good way to “dip our toe in the water” without taking a full dive.

We have a number of clients who use both FanMail and Topspin in tandem. FanMail for email, sms, automation and database management and Topspin for transactions, media and widgets. I’m hopeful that as the dev team continues to build out their APIs, that the doors will be opened where these two world class systems can continue to compliment each other. Ian, can I hear an open source yelp?

To top it off (and inspired by the class project) I’m working with Josiah to bring The Lion’s Rampant album “It’s fun to do bad things” to market for a March release on Topspin. This band it too much fun and I’m sure there will be more insights on this to come.

Ok, I’m off to find an apple for the teacher.

Until next time!

David