SANTA MONICA, Calif. — As the buzz surrounding Google Inc.’s efforts to jump into the digital music market rose to a roar late August, one name kept surfacing about the person who might lead it — Ian Rogers.

There were good reasons. Rogers had once headed up Yahoo Inc.’s $140 million music business after selling his music software company, Mediacode. The 38-year-old, with his long blond hair and tattooed fingers, has been at the forefront of digital music and came out ahead when others perished from the brutal economics of the Internet.

Google will have to look elsewhere. Rogers believes he’ll have more influence as chief executive of Topspin, a small startup in Santa Monica that helps bands market and sell their music online.

Another reason: Google’s plan did not appear radical enough to Rogers.

“It sounds like they’re just going knocking on doors looking to license content for streaming and download,” Rogers wrote on his blog the day after his name surfaced on Billboard’s website as a potential candidate for Google’s venture. “Yawn.”

An avid skateboarder who practiced back flips by strapping a snowboard to his backyard trampoline, Rogers says he’s more interested in finding ways that technology can create new business models for the musicians than defending the status quo of the music industry. And he sees Topspin — despite a name that evokes 45-rpm vinyl — offering musicians the digital tools to sell music directly to fans and bypass labels.

The music freak in Rogers emerged at age 5, when he began collecting albums of heavy metal bands such as Kiss and AC/DC. Growing up in the small town of Goshen, Ind., Rogers often asked his mother to drive him an hour west to South Bend so he could buy a copy of Maximumrocknroll, a punk music fanzine.

Rogers’ precociousness extended to his becoming a father at age 17.

When his daughter, Zoe, was born, he was still a senior in high school. In his family that was not considered unusual; Rogers’ mother was 16 when she had her first child. What he did next was unusual. Rogers went off to college — the first person in his family to do so — and he took his daughter with him. Rogers and Zoe’s mother, Susanna Golden, timed their classes so one parent would always be with her. When schedules conflicted, Rogers plopped Zoe on his bicycle and took her along.

For record labels, Topspin straddles a delicate balance between disruptive and constructive.

Artists can use Topspin’s tools to bypass record labels. Bands can build their own online fan base and sell music, merchandise and even concert tickets directly to consumers. In return, Topspin gets a cut of the sales. As musicians become more established, they can hire managers and, eventually, labels to take over those tasks. Whoever ends up with the job still would use the tools provided by Topspin.

“What’s interesting about Topspin is that they have users from every level in the ecosystem,” said Ryan McIntyre, a managing director with the Foundry Group, a venture firm that invested in Topspin. “However the industry shakes out, everyone will have a use for them.”

Topspin’s clients include Arcade Fire, Beck, Eminem, David Byrne, Brian Eno and more than 2,000 other artists, many of whom don’t have label contracts.

But the company is not yet profitable. Rogers regards that fact with the same optimism he had as a teenage father heading off to college.

“There are fewer than 50,000 artists whose main gig is their music,” Rogers said. “My belief is that number will grow. If we work hard as a company to make it possible for artists to make a living, we can grow that number to 100,000. Music is a $60 billion business. If half of that is generated by that middle class of 100,000 artists, that’s a sizable market.”