As an active Orchard client, you’ve probably been using the sophisticated products we’ve released over the past few years; including Release Builder (create releases), Artist Builder (manage an artist roster and their marketing assets) and our new Marketplace (use third party sales and marketing tools). The next logical step is an enhanced version of our Release Analytics so that you can track sales activity across your entire catalogue both at a high level overview and deep into the details.
The new version of Analytics will allow you to better understand your sales trends so that you can shift resources and budget on projects and trends that are worthwhile for your business. Many Orchard clients have asked for new tools allowing for a macro view of their businesses. We listened and developed these new features:
No more excuses! Go create new releases with Release Builder, market your artists with Artist Builder and The Marketplace, and track your sales activity with Analytics. We’ve tried to create a line of products that impact all aspects of the album life cycle and, as always, we appreciate your feedback and ideas for future upgrades. Please email feedback@theorchard.com with your suggestions.
From left to right, our very own CEO Brad Navin, SVP of Marketing Pete McCarthy, VP of Product Marketing Jaclyn Ranere and Musart's Federico Baptista
Earlier in September, The Orchard spent several days in the ever-thriving music city of Los Angeles, CA where we have a formidable roster of independent record label clients. Representing the true eclectic nature of our client base, the labels run the gamut from Dance to Hip-Hop, Pop to Metal to Latin, and literally every micro genre in between.
Celebrating the launch of our Marketplace - the new platform we built for our labels to simplify the process of utilizing third party marketing, D2C, and communication applications – we gathered our labels together for a couple of events and then spent additional time visiting their offices and talking about their music, how their businesses are evolving and how we can help them embrace the new services and technologies out there.
This is an exciting time to be putting out music and adapting to the new music industry. New services like YouTube, Spotify, Rdio, and Turntable.fm have arrived and are impacting how new fans acquire music and how labels make money from music. Social marketing has become a super viable, powerful and measureable way to communicate with fans, and labels have more tools than ever to take advantage of the new digital economy and promote their artists’ music. Labels have adapted to the decline of physical by embracing the playlist business (aided by our Orchard Workstation “Create a Compilation Tool”) and are able to put out more music as a result. They’re using our Analytics tools to measure how their sales are evolving; they’re using Release Builder and Artist Builder to manage their releases and artist-oriented social marketing syndication; and now with The Marketplace, they’ve got a world of Apps at their fingertips.
Indeed, technology is helping the fiercely independent people running record labels stay independent, keep their overhead low and connect with more potential consumers than ever before. It is an inspiration to watch, and a thrill to be a part of that change.
Long live independent music.
The Orchard’s product team creates web applications which allow our labels to maximize growth and interaction with each of their artists’ fan base. It’s one of our goals to create forward-thinking technologies that will not only enrich the fans relationship with an artist, but also make the lives of our label managers easier.
You probably already know that Artist Builder is a great way to sync tour dates across facebook, twitter and myspace. You can import them from SongKick or add them by hand. But once the tour dates are in there, we can do a lot more than just publish them.
Introducing the Tour Date Module–an embeddable, customizable HTML element that displays all upcoming tour dates, venue info and links to buy tickets. It’s perfect for social network profiles, microsites, blogs or anywhere else fans interact with their favorite artists. For fans, it’s a huge improvement over using a service such as Ticketmaster or StubHub to blindly hunt for tickets on an external site. And for artist management, it means never having to waste time updating tour dates again.
We’ve already started using the module. See it in action on Laura Cantrell’s new site.
The Orchard’s Artist Builder makes it easy for artists, managers and labels to update multiple social profiles simultaneously from one central location, eliminating the headache of updating individual profiles across multiple networks. Artist Builder is available to all Orchard clients through their Workstation, where they will enter tour dates, news, video links, and photos, and then publish the information to their Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace accounts, as well as to their artist websites and blogs. Clients will also be able to sync tour dates with Songkick. All of the release and artist information that The Orchard captures through the Workstation is also available to developers through The Orchard’s API.
Artist Builder from The Orchard on Vimeo.
Artists, managers and labels must keep up with the lightning-fast pace of the Internet to keep their fans engaged, but they also have to carefully regulate the time they spend updating social networks with the time they spend writing songs, designing merch, and plotting marketing campaigns, among many other things. With Artist Builder, users can log in to one place to manage artist information and then quickly publish out to the largest social networks and concert databases.
“Our product development and engineering teams are focused on creating a suite of products that complement our core business of selling music and also benefit our clients,” says Josh Builder, VP of Product Development at The Orchard. “Artist Builder makes social marketing simple, fast, and in the near future, trackable against digital sales, so our clients can see which messages and networks are effective.”
