Philippe Giard
Client and Interactive Marketing Manager, France & Benelux
Joined The Orchard in November 2011
Bonjour! I hear we have you to thank for the amazing French translations on our website and Workstation… Aside from that, what the #&@$ do you do?
It’s one of the advantages of being a French native; I can speak and write quite good French, but on the other side I think I will keep all my life an incredible French accent in English…
Apart from translating a lot of things from English to French (blurbs, contracts, Facebook ads…) and also translating on the other side from French to Frenglish, I work on a daily basis with around 30 French-speaking labels from France, Switzerland and Belgium, helping them with the Workstation, metadata, digital strategy, release date, pricing, Spotify playlists, presenting their releases to our retail team, helping them to get an EIN from the IRS, …
On the other side I also try to help our bands and artists from all over the world to get a better set up in France by talking with their labels, French agents, French indie PR, journalists… I write the French monthly newsletter (en français!!), which is sent to 400 people in the French business, as part of this process. The other goal is to accelerate The Orchard’s notoriety here in France and it’s already progressing as people start now to pronounce our name correctly instead of Ze Orkard!!
I dunno… Ze Orkard has its appeal… never underestimate the power of the French accent on the rest of the world!
What kind of labels do you work with?
I have so far a quite large range of labels and music, from Classical music (Alia Vox, Claves, Saphir, VDE-Gallo) to French catalog (Isis, RDV Digital — one of our biggest catalog labels) but also international catalogs (Plaza Mayor), Relaxation music (Fonda-Mental), Brazilian music (Urban Jungle — big up to Olivier de Simone!) and we just signed recently with some labels representing exciting new French Acts (DBTH, Deaf Rock Records). I try to do my best to help sign more great French music, talking regularly to many producers, managers, agents and promoters I met when I was previously working at French indie label naïve for 10 years.
In a few words I’m the French guy in the French office trying to help The Orchard’s Frenchyfication.
Lasagneria: a local specialty in Brussels
It has become my custom to complain in these blog posts about how “tough” my life is… I wouldn’t dare disrupt the trend this month! My latest adventure are the two nights I spent in Amsterdam as part of my responsibilities as Vice-President, France and Benelux for The Orchard to personally meet up and talk with new labels coming in through our recent fusion with IODA.
It brought back (hazy) memories of previous trips in my time as International Manager for an Indie French Distributor. In those days The Netherlands especially were one of our biggest export territories, almost rivaling Germany, whilst Belgium with its partly French-speaking population was also a key market for us.
When I first started at The Orchard five years ago in Marketing and took a look at the figures, I was surprised to see the comparatively low numbers coming through from download stores in these countries, clearly inferior to their physical market-shares. The customer base had still obviously remained attached to CDs, feasibly because they were easily available in chain-stores like Free Record Shops and as a result of lacking local language alternatives or editorially managed digital download stores.
Since I’m also a bit obsessed with data (it’s great when you’ve bought up a bag of sales gold from the digital mines to be able to understand what the size, origin and nature of the nuggets are), it was also interesting for me to see that the ‘à la carte’ download figures for both The Netherlands and Belgium progressed year on year in parallel, mirroring each other’s development almost unit by unit.
This was still the case until last year, when two streaming services began to bring revenue into the Dutch digital sales eco-system. The good news for all our labels was that this was incremental, on top of a progression from the Dutch download stores that not only did not decrease – no cannibalization here – but actually began to increase faster than that of their Belgian neighbours.
