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Ex-Beatle's stepsister launches new media player for musicians
By Jason Cook
jcook52@mscd.edu

Photo by Rachel Crick • crick@mscd.edu Ruth McCartney, spoke Aug. 19 at the DeVry Institue. McCartney and a team of developers were promoting their ifanz and iplayer, software components that work with websites like MySpace.

Media pioneers Ruth McCartney and Martin Nethercutt were keynote speakers at a MySpace symposium on Saturday, discussing the launch of a new tool designed to help independent musicians market themselves more effectively.

McCartney and Nethercutt founded their company, iFanz, in 2003 to fill a void in the fan-relationship market. At the time, musicians’ relationships with their clients were primarily managed by record companies on the artists’ behalf.

McCartney, who got her start at age four answering fan mail for her stepbrother Paul, wanted to create a way for artists to communicate more directly with their fans.

“Growing up in Liverpool and witnessing my stepbrother and his partner, John Lennon, lamenting ‘the suits’ in the music business has given me a very protective view of the whole ownership, mechanicals and publishing situation,” Ruth said.

This protective view led her to create iFanz, an online turnkey fan-relationship system that allows artists to have a direct relationship with their fans, unmediated by public relations people or music executives.

iFanz is marketed primarily at burgeoning musicians, but it has attracted a wide range of clientele, from actors such as John Cleese and Val Kilmer to more established musical acts such as REO Speedwagon and Clint Black.

iFanz is superior to a traditional e-mail list, according to McCartney, because of the in-depth nature of its demographics.

"(It) lets you collect data, store data and blast out e-mails, ZIP (code) by ZIP (code),” she said. “If you’re doing a show in Chicago, you don’t want to blanket everyone in Dallas. … It will also, once it collects the data, tell you, ‘Hey, this is where you should be playing gigs, ’cause this is where your fans are.’”

The star of her presentation, however, was the iFanz media player. This player is designed to integrate with MySpace profiles and band websites, synchronizing with an artist’s iFanz account.
A musician can upload songs to iFanz and make them available for selection and purchase from any site in which the player is embedded, including a MySpace profile.

More importantly, according to McCartney, the artist’s intellectual property is protected. When the iFanz player was released, MySpace was in the midst of a high-profile argument over their terms of service.

At the time, MySpace’s terms of service required that by uploading content to MySpace, a user granted NewsCorp, MySpace’s parent company, royalty-free rights to reuse, rebroadcast and redistribute content as they saw fit.

This requirement was brought to the media’s attention by London musician Billy Bragg who touched off the controversy when he removed his music from his MySpace page.

MySpace eventually backed down from this requirement, changing their terms and conditions, but McCartney took steps to make sure that artists’ rights are protected.

iFanz’s terms of service state that “You shall retain all copyrights. iFanz agrees not to republish, copy or distribute your materials for film, television, commercials, jingles, compilations, CDs, DVDs or any other mechanical or royalty-bearing media without your prior consent and subsequent financial participation therein.”

This means it will never redistribute or reuse an artist’s music without the permission of that artist.
Additionally, the iFanz player allows tracking of demographic information regarding the geographical regions in which songs are being played. It uses Google maps to present a color-coded world map showing the areas in which songs are receiving the most plays.

Overall, said McCartney, “with the iFanz engine to manage your fans and mailing lists and newsletters, as well as the new iPlayer, a musician really has a great shot at positioning and protecting themselves for the future.”

iFanz is accessible on the web at http://www.ifanz.com.

McCartney’s presentation was part of a symposium hosted by the DaVinci Institute, a Louisville - based think tank that specializes in exposing new ideas to the small business and entrepreneurial community.