Here in the Product department, we’re always busy building cool stuff to make life (and business) easier for our clients. This time, we’re very pleased to announce the launch of a brand new Accounting section. Please, everyone, calm down. Excuse me, sir, can you put your shirt back on? This is a family blog. Thanks.
We’ve rebuilt Accounting from the ground up — updating the look and feel, improving the workflow, and boosting performance. The user experience should be more painless than ever.
Our new accounting can now generate combined statements, showing you expenses, checks, adjustments, and your net balance over your selected time span and multiple periods. This can generate a lot of pages, so we’ve also added a “go to page” box down by the pagination, so you never have to click 37 times to get to page 38.
Filtering is now much easier and more powerful, too. While viewing your revenue breakdown, you can filter by any criteria, or combinations. Only interested in how a certain release has sold? Filter by release (multiple versions are differentiated by their UPCs). Want to see if that iTunes UK promotion was worth it? Filter by store, then by country. The filters are designed to be played with, so you can add or remove them one at a time, or en masse.
Exports are now easier than ever too. You can now export your accounting statement in Excel or plain text, filtered or not, on the Statements page.
The most common question around accounting, of course, is “When will I get paid?” To that end, we’ve redesigned the Statements page to be clearer and easier to read. It now gives you a more accurate estimate of when your check will be cut, based on your contract type.
Those are just the highlights — for more, check out the demo below and if you’re an Orchard client, go see it for yourself in The Orchard Workstation!
We know we just shared some exciting updates to our Analytics product a few weeks ago, but we have yet another one we’re dying to announce: in addition to tracking our clients’ sales and streams of audio and video, Analytics can now track social media data from Facebook! Instead of relying on hunches and guesswork, our clients will be able to look at hard data to see if their social media efforts are driving sales.
There are three new channels that detail Facebook activity: Fans Gained, Fans Lost and Engagement. Fans Gained is the total number of people who “liked” your Facebook fan page. Fans Lost is the total number of people who “unliked” your page. Engagement is how your fans react to your artists’ Facebook content: comments, Likes, mentions, content shares, posts to your Wall, event RSVPs, photo tags, etc. Facebook displays a monthly total of this on a fan page, and calls it “People talking about,” but Analytics can give you daily counts.
That said, these new channels will only show up if you have connected at least one artist’s Facebook account in Artist Builder. You can check this in Artist Builder, under the social connections tab. Make sure each artist or film is connected to its own account. If they aren’t connected to any accounts, they won’t display any social data in Analytics; and if an artist is connected to the same account as other artists (such as a label fan page), all the artists connected to that account will display a skewed daily total in their social channels.
The Orchard Analytics is available to all clients of The Orchard, providing labels, artists and filmmakers with information they can use to make smarter marketing decisions and spends — and now, in particular, evaluate the effectiveness of social media!
Brace yourselves, Orchard clients — we have yet another awesome update to The Orchard Analytics. We are now giving you daily data feeds of AmazonMP3 U.S. sales, and streams from Spotify and Rdio. For video, we’ve fixed the YouTube feed, which now updates weekly, and added video download and rental data from Xbox.
This means that all Orchard clients have access to an unprecedented smorgasbord of digital media intelligence. While the new data feeds are automatically added to your overview graphs, here’s how to see just the new stuff: in the top panel of the Overview page, to the left of the Apply button, there are two dropdown menus. You’ll find the new data feeds under the first one, All Sources. If you only want to see your Amazon numbers, select Amazon from the list, hit apply, and then use Analytics as normal — your results will only show data from Amazon. If you want to compare how you are performing in different stores (say, Rdio and Spotify) you can do that by going to a detail page. Below the graph, select the fourth Breakdown option, “Stores.” Once it’s loaded, you can check on and off the stores you want to see.
We’re thrilled about all this new data, because more data means all out clients can make smarter decisions. AmazonMP3 is our second biggest store besides iTunes, and one of the fastest growing digital marketplaces in the world — we’re only tracking Amazon U.S. for now, but the rest of the world will come soon! Streaming services like Spotify and Rdio are increasingly becoming the go-to option for “checking out this new band.” As social media becomes even more central to marketing and promotion, your plays on streaming music services become a very low-latency barometer of your label’s buzz and impact. With daily feeds, you can now see how many plays your artists and releases are getting, and quickly adjust your marketing efforts for maximum impact.
So go check out all your new data in Analytics! Because we don’t want you to wonder; we want you to know.
Those of you who use the Orchard’s Analytics product may have noticed the recent appearance of a lovely orange “Add Event” Button. We’re pretty excited about this — it allows you to annotate the graph with events that may have impacted your sales.
By now, you’ve all played with Analytics enough to have noticed some spikes in your sales or streams. And you’ve probably asked yourself why. We certainly have. Events are here to help you understand that. Was your new single featured in a movie trailer? Did your new release get a good review on Pitchfork? By marking these events on your graph, and seeing what happens, we can start developing an understanding of what creates these spikes.
The goal here is to provide an open-ended tool for examining the impact of your marketing efforts. For this first release we kept it simple. Click the Add Event button. Select a date, enter a title for the event, pick an artist and relevant category. Hit save. That’s it. Events are indicated by a grey vertical line; hover on it to see the event, and click on it to ‘pin’ the event in place. Click again to un-pin it. Pinning an event means the event will stay put while you navigate, and also allows you to delete events. Events intelligently filter themselves based on what data you are looking at. The default, label-wide view shows all events; change your view to certain artists or releases, and you’ll only see events relevant to those artists.
There are about 9 million cool features we want to add to Events. For instance, event categorizations doesn’t do anything right now, but in the future this will allow you to hide and show events by their category, as well as tell you what kinds of events get used most often. Another feature already in the works is to automatically show you premium ad placements in online music stores. Combined with the existing ability to filter by country and store, this will provide powerful insights into the effectiveness of those placements.
We have a lot planned for Events. More important, though, is how YOU would use this. What would it do if it were magic? Head over to your analytics, give it a whirl, and let us know how it could be improved.
Ex.fm - the browser extension I’d previously gushed about here - got another mention on our site headlines last week when they raised $1.5 million in VC funding. Since relaunching in October (and porting it to Firefox and Safari, from Chrome) their user base has grown to over 300,000.
Ex.fm allows you to grab audio from many different web sources, play it all in a queue, and save tracks you loved. It’s like having a personal assistant just for your music. But there’s also a social layer, and the more people start using this service, the better it gets. Here are two of the best new features that have been blowing my mind:
While this last functionality has existed for a while (Hype Machine does it for blogs, Streampad does it for Tumblrs), ex.fm is a much more open and modular platform. Because it’s free, requires no upkeep, and it can piggyback on existing music blogs, it has the potential to become the Google Reader of new music.
