We recently launched an app in The Orchard Marketplace which makes it its goal to pair artists and labels with the perfect director for their music videos.
This app, Radar Music Videos, has quite a few success stories to support its mission, and in this guest blog post, Caroline Bottomley, Managing Director of Radar, is going to share two of them.
Read up, and if you’re a client of The Orchard, install Radar Music Videos in the Marketplace.
Alt-J “Breezeblocks” — Director: Ellis Bahl
The Artist/Label and The Brief
Spring last year, Infectious Music posted a music video brief for their new UK signing Alt-J on Radar, with the teasing headline “INTRIGUING DIRECTORS ONLY NEED APPLY.”
Alt-J were still relatively unknown at the time, but sharper directors knew the band and liked the look of the £4k (approx. $6k) budget.
The Response
Radar has thousands of professional directors worldwide and our back-end shows the brief was viewed nearly 1,500 times. 41 directors submitted treatments to Infectious’ label manager Connie Meade, via the Radar mechanism. That was a lot of treatments for Connie to work through. Nowadays we recommend that labels expecting a big response state: “we only want to hear from experienced directors who have made popular, award-winning, brand-commissioned or editorially-featured videos,” or something similar.
The Director
Ellis Bahl was a young director in New York. He’d had some success with MTV Idents and co-directions of music videos, but was ready to branch out on his own. You can see the treatment he wrote on the Radar blog — and you’ll see it has a different ending to the finished video.
What Happened Next
Infectious’ brilliant marketing helped push Alt-J higher and higher up the media’s agenda. This video in particular got them coverage across U.K. media and a high profile feature in The Huffington Post. The director began to be courted by talent spotters and he’s now represented by two of the best agencies in the U.S. and U.K. (and now works with much bigger budgets). By the end of the year, Alt-J had won the Mercury Prize, the video won ‘Best Alternative Video’ at the UK Music Video Awards and from amongst the many millions of videos on Vimeo, it was chosen as one of the Best 12 Videos on Vimeo of 2012.
Co-starring Connie Britton and Hayden Panettiere, ABC’s hot new drama Nashville has been steaming up our Wednesday nights.
Well get ready for an even more exciting Wednesday than usual: The Black Angels‘ fan favorite track “Telephone” will be featured in tonight’s episode.
If you haven’t peeked the sensation, the story follows a Honky-Tonk diva past her prime, Rayna James (Britton), who must reconcile her career by teaming up with the latest hit Country starlet, Juliette Barnes (Panettiere). Premiering to rave reviews, this new show features the sounds of the historic city it’s named after, a whole lotta big hair, and it has just been picked up for a full season by the network. Plus, Big Machine has signed on to release a soundtrack by the holidays.
Listen up for our Angels’ track in this drama-infused episode, as Rayna tries to spice up her sound in a session with music producer Liam McGuinnis.
Y’all catch up on a few full episodes of Nashville here, and tune in at 10 P.M EST tonight!
Post written by Sara Rachele
Time to brush up on the latest dance moves!
Rock along to your favorite Atlanta trio’s signature jam ’cause Lil Jon & The Eastside Boyz’ “Get Low” is now featured in the videogame Dance Central 3! Whether you’re a beginner or an expert, Microsoft’s Dance Central 3 offers some vibrant dance avatars to demo their slick choreography, and one of the game’s original dance routines is set to our very own.
Hope you’re ready to sweat… the boyz’ routine takes some serious skills (Level HARD). You can always count on Lil Jon and his fellas to provide some Southern hospitality to every virtual party.
Dance Central 3 featuring Lil Jon & The Eastside Boyz is out now at your favorite video game store, so go grab your copy and get your moves on without delay.
In the meantime, throw some ‘bows and check out the placement, ok? Ye-ah!
Post written by Sara Rachele.
Pretty & Nice are not an easy band to get a handle on. Some pin their sound as Cocteau meets Costello; Pitchfork was quick to slap a New Wave label on their last LP, Get Young, and trot out XTC, the Jam, and DEVO references faster than you could say “Science Friction.” Others have struggled to understand the downshift-without-the-clutch refrains that typify their songs and find comfort in drawing a comparison with Of Montreal. Sometimes even the Shins get name checked. There is some degree of truthiness in these contextualizations, but band comparison pandaemonium is not the way to shepherd a listener’s ears to a newer, greener frontier of undiscovered pop music. Perk up young buffalo, lush pastures are upon us: the new Pretty & Nice EP, Us You All We, will bring about an entente among head scratching music scribblers, and provide plenty to chew on for the rest of us. Open a friendly ear and let the music stream.
Us You All We is the most harmonious Pretty & Nice release to date. The production-forward experimentation that has characterized their recorded career has coalesced into a more pure, more measured, and ultimately more focused vision of pop music. We still find thick tapestries of guitar fizz, note-in-the-margin synth iambs, modulated vibraphones from outer space, and a spectrum of drum sounds that range from the dead thump of a well-oiled baseball mitt to the flint and tinsel tic-tac of chopsticks on notebook paper, but instead of fighting for the spotlight or pushing the listener away from the song, these elements are meticulously arranged to support one another and invite second listens. The leaps from one compositional idea to the next are not jarring or clever-seeming so much as pleasantly surprising, whimsical, and often wonder-filled. The same is true of the vocals. Lewis and Mendicino aren’t call-and-response bickering with one another, or even respectfully taking turns at the mic; this time around they’re working together and telling the same story. This is Pretty & Nice’s most unified vision. It’s a welcome evolution for long-time fans and a perfect, succinct starting point for the new and curious.
A collaborative, hopeful spirit is the molten stuff at the core of Us You All We’s songwriting. These are four inspired, joyful tracks that stomp through the underbrush of an imagined landscape searching for the sunbeams of spring. Even on the post-apocalyptic “Hyena” (which culminates in medical experimentation!), the protagonist finds comfort in dire times by singing a Billy Joel song to himself. On “Dan’s Heart” we encounter all the creatures of the natural world. And to mention first things last, EP Opener “Hibernate” is more about emerging from a dormant time than entering into one. In this new waking life we are asked to check our rational tendencies at the mouth of the cave and prepare ourselves for a journey to the sky, where all beings hover in diamond-like refraction. Glorious, and an apt metaphor for Pretty & Nice.
Guest post by: Scott Lindenbaum and Grace Converse
Pre-order your copy of Pretty & Nice’s Us You All We on Pledge Music and get a whole bag of super cool exclusives too.
In the discographic domain, figures have always been important. Bands, labels, distributors and agencies often rely on numbers.
In that regard, technology and the digital world can really help us make the right decisions. The Orchard implemented a statistical analysis tool that turned out to be extraordinarily useful in a variety of situations.
We are talking about the ‘Analytics’ section that has been available for some time now. Whether you want to keep track of sales, you are planning marketing investments, you want to know what platforms are preferred for digital download vs just streaming, you want to know if an artist’s album or its single tracks are being sold and why not, or even what countries buyers come from, then you could easily use this robust Analytics feature.
This is not all. An iTunes specific section is also available, showing exactly where (even telling you the postal code) and when (exact time) buyers click to purchase music. This could be an alternative and nice way for artists to spot what doors to knock on for a direct meet and greet with their fans! Just kidding.
So why is this information so useful? Simply because it allows you to monitor the digital market growth in almost-real-time and then identify strong and weak points. Let us make some practical examples:
Recently, Italian artist Colapesce shot a very good video for his single “Satellite“ from his new album titled Un meraviglioso declino. This song was released as a single because the artist teamed up with Meg (former 99 Posse singer) to re-release another version of the same song. We noticed that making the single available for purchase, along with the video clip, not only boosted the sales of the song but of the full album as well.
Another example is “Happy!!!,” Sycamore Age’s video of their single. It has collected thousands of click-throughs on Vevo; so many that from the moment the album was available for purchase, the sales of their self-titled album were immediately and positively impacted. Also, Sycamore Age are being appreciated (and downloaded) very much outside of Italy thanks to their excellent English pronunciation. This information allows us to launch specific marketing campaigns to try to bring the band into those countries in Europe that showed more interest towards their music.
We could go on and on with hundreds of different examples but we understand that this could be boring. What we recommend you do is check out all these new possibilities and features since we think that the ‘Analytics’ tool that Orchard has created is a wonderful way to help us avoid mistakes and focus where to spend our energy (and money) on.
- Guest post written by Gabriele Giustini, Audioglobe (Italy)
