Topspin Music Marketing Platform Is (Finally) Offline

Once hailed as the savior of the music industry, direct to fan marketing platform Topspin Media has been offline for days.

Topspin was founded in 2007 by Peter Gotcher, the co-creator of Pro Tools and Shamal Ranasinghe now a senior member of the Pandora AMP team.

In 2008, former Yahoo! Music General Manager Ian C. Rogers was named CEO of Topspin and appeared on the cover of Billboard. That same year, Topspin was named Indie Visionary of the Year by Billboard magazine.

At its peak, more than 35,000 musicians, comedians, labels, managers and filmmakers used Topspin.

But in many ways, Topspin was ahead of the curve. Many labels were not ready to fully embrace direct to fan marketing and sales; while others thought they could just do it themselves.

Also, in an effort to offer truly diverse services, Topspin was too difficult to use for many. Rogers and Mike King of the Berklee College of Music even created a now-defunct online college-level course to try to solve that problem and teach best practices.

In 2014, Rogers became CEO of Beats Music and brought Topspin with him. But just months later Beats sold Topspin to Transom Capital Group, owners of BandMerch and Cinderblock.

Topspin has been on the decline since.

In recent years, the new owners did little to update or promote the platform while dozens of innovative competitors flourished.

Now offline for several days, neither Topsin or BandMerch have not responded to our inquires for comment.