By Duncan Geere, Wired UK

When seasoned digital music executive Ian Rogers departed Yahoo Music after five years in April 2008 for a stealth startup, most of the journalistic attention focused on Yahoo’s slow demise, rather than his mysterious new project.

That new project turned out to be Topspin Media, a direct-to-fan marketing-and-retail software platform that just launched to the public at South by Southwest in Texas.

From the dull description, you might not think Topspin is terribly exciting, but it hides a web service that could herald as big a change for music marketing as Spotify has for music listening. During an extended invite-only beta period, artists as diverse and popular as Paul McCartney, Arcade Fire, Linkin Park, Eminem, the Pixies, Trent Reznor and the Beastie Boys signed up to the service, and whisperings began to emerge about a remarkable offering that takes the internet’s strengths and uses them to make a band’s relationship with its fans deeply personal again.

Topspin allows artists to do a wide range of things. You can upload and manage music, videos, images and other digital assets. You can manage merchandise, fan clubs and VIP memberships in all kinds of configurations. You can book shows, sell tickets and even use an iPhone app on the door to make sure that people have paid for entry. Most importantly, you can bundle and sell any of those things across the world without having to deal with taxes or privacy issues.

But what Topspin does is bigger than just selling box sets. “The real benefit of Topspin is to provide the technology that enables artists to end the mass-market messaging efforts of record labels,” said David Riley at digital music consultancy Good Lizard Media. “What Topspin cumulatively does will help music regrow after years of mass marketing, lawsuits and draconian restrictions imposed by the record labels that have near ruined it. It unifies the digital marketing effort; combining mailing list, store, widgets, data collection and players into one cohesive database.”

It’s clear that Topspin’s philosophy is closely aligned with some of the thinkers on the cutting edge of digital music. The service’s FAQ contains dire warnings about spam, and quotes Tim O’Reilly saying, “Piracy is not the enemy, obscurity is,” and Mike Masnick’s famous CWF + RTB = $$ equation.

However, that doesn’t mean that Topspin’s users will follow those principles. A music marketing agency source close to Topspin, who declined to be named, told Wired.co.uk: “Topspin’s depth of data collection and filtration is incredible, and it’s pretty easy to use, but I doubt it will save the music industry in the way people are hoping. There’s still a need for cash to be pumped into it and there’s got to be systems in place for it to work properly and efficiently. My concern is that it will create a load of cookie-cutter marketing plans that just offer a download in exchange for an e-mail address and then spam those people.”

Rogers acknowledges that people might fall back to bad habits because they don’t understand the software. In a post on his personal blog he admitted: “I’ve pushed the team for a breadth of features rather than ease of use. We’ve spent much of 2011 trying to take the breadth of our offering and make it easier to explain, grok and ultimately use.”

‘Our vision for Topspin is to be Photoshop, not MS Paint.’

He added: “That said, our vision for Topspin is to be Photoshop, not MS Paint, ProTools not Garage Band, Final Cut Pro not iMovie. None of those products are something you just sit down and start using expertly without some practice or instruction. The learning curve yields power.”

Of course, Topspin’s not the only direct-to-fan offering on the block, in the same way that Spotify isn’t the only streaming service around. Competitors such as Bandcamp and Music Glue offer some of the same features, at a reduced cost. Andy Malt, editor of music industry newsletter CMU Daily, told Wired.co.uk: “Topspin is one of a number of direct-to-fan systems currently available to artists, but is by far the heavyweight amongst them. You need to have a certain size of following before it’s worthwhile shelling out for — services such as Bandcamp and Music Glue allow more room for bands to build upon smaller fan bases.”

It’s that price factor that’s most likely to put people off. While Topspin appears to offer the widest breadth of features, there’s no freemium or cut-rate version that offers limited features for a lower cost. You can sign up for free and poke around the tools available, but to actually use any of them you’ll need to sign up for a $10-per-month account.

Is that good value? “Their new offering (from what I’ve seen) is a pretty nice product for a smaller artist who doesn’t have the resources of a label to draw upon,” said David Emery, head of digital marketing at Beggars Group. “But for us they don’t really offer anything we can’t do ourselves, and it’s quite expensive.”

Malt broadly agreed: “Artists will continue to need investment (traditionally from a record company) to help them to truly hit the big time for the foreseeable future, but direct-to-fan services, including Topspin, allow musicians to manage their own careers to levels that were largely unheard of just a few years ago, provided they’re willing to put in the hard work on both the creative and business sides of things.”

Are you an artist or marketer who’s used Topspin or similar music marketing services? How has it affected your relationship with your fans? Or, if you’re a music fan, do you see services like Topspin as a good thing? Drop us a comment below with your thoughts.