Keen On… Audience: Why Fans Are The Real Future Of The Music Business (TCTV)

Andrew Keen

Andrew Keen is an Anglo-American entrepreneur, writer, broadcaster and public speaker. He is the author of the international hit “Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is Killing our Culture” which has been published in 17 different languages and was short-listed for the Higham’s Business Technology Book of the Year award. As a pioneering Silicon Valley based Internet entrepreneur,... → Learn More

Monday, February 27th, 2012


The most profound of all the digital disruptions that have occurred over the last 20 years has been the breach in trust between the creative artist and audience. It’s this disruption that decimated the traditional recorded music industry; and it’s only by curing this distrust that the music industry can rebuild itself.

Today, I’m interviewing Cary Sherman, the CEO of the RIAA, about the future of music industry and this two-part interview will run tomorrow and Wednesday. But before I broadcasted my conversation with Sherman, I wanted to run my last two interviews from SFMusicTech. Both of these interviews – with the co-founder of Moontoast, Marcus Whitney and with the Chief Marketing Officer of MobileBackstage.com David Hazan – deal with the dramatic changes in the relationship between artist and audience. Moontoast and MobileBackstage.com are both similarly small sized, early stage start-ups and both are offering promising digital solutions to rebuilding the once fractured relationship between musical artists and musical fans.

When I asked Marcus Whitney why his company was named Moontoast, he explained that the founders realized that they were either going to go to the moon or become toast. The same can be said for the many other innovative start-ups that are now rebuilding the music business. I’ve been in the digital music business since the mid-nineties, and I’ve never been more optimistic about the innovation going on in the industry now. Rather than becoming toast, I suspect that today’s digital music business, by reinventing the relationship between artist and fan, now really is on its way to the moon.


Company: Moontoast
Website: moontoast.com
Launch Date: February 2008
Funding: $11M

Moontoast, a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer, offers a brand new and innovative method of Facebook marketing and advertising, Social Rich Media. Moontoast’s Social Rich Media Ad Platform empowers brands with the ability to inject Facebook Page Posts (ads and sponsored stories) with more visual, auditory, and interactive functionality than ever before, making sure that brands get the most value out of their posts as well as their media spend. These Social Rich Media posts appear in the most engaging...

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Company: Mobile Backstage
Launch Date: September 2009
Funding: €1M

Mobile Backstage is a FRM (Fan Relationship Management) platform, that changes the way anyone with a fan-base, such as bands and artists, connect with their fans. Mobile Backstage believe that a true fan is worth a million listeners, and can help to identify who they are and provide a platform to build a community, increase fan engagement and both manage & monetize fan relationships. Mobile Backstage have apps for different platforms, such as Facebook, iOS and Android, to interact with...

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