This is it… our last 15th anniversary post for the year. It’s been a great one, and as we shared in last month’s post, we’re so very grateful to have these incredible years behind us and such promising prospects ahead.
For this post, we got all Orchardite minds together to assemble our trimmed down 15 most likely predictions for 2013. The product you see below is a carefully crafted selection of scientifically backed probabilities, and we stand behind these insights 100%.
1. Cleopatra will release Sounds Like… The Sound Of Music Meets Gangnam Style.
2. ICQ will launch a major comeback including direct chat lines with your favorite artists.
3. Our Compilations department will invent a new genre called “PUBSTEP,” Irish folk tunes set to dubstep beats. It will become so popular that iTunes will create a new genre page for it.
4. Apple will introduce iChew, described by Phil Schiller as “an amazing leap in chewing gum technology.” Each iChew will be WiFi and Bluetooth enabled, letting you download new flavors from the Cloud, or if you’re an AT&T customer, using your 4G connection. It will be Siri activated by double-chomping with your canine tooth and speaking the flavor you want to download. Within seconds, the iChew will taste exactly like the requested flavor. Each flavor will cost 99 cents, and each stick of iChew will cost $399.99 for the Trident size, $499.99 for a “Hubba Bubba” size.
5. Lychelle [our wonderful receptionist] will forget to send out an email about washing the fruit before consuming and someone will consume before washing.
6. Tee Pee Records will issue a vinyl release with blotter acid in the label ink. Lick, spin and enjoy!
7. One of Richard Gottehrer’s YouTube ideas — a cooking show filmed at CBGB with recipes sung by The Raveonettes — will become so wildly popular that Honey Boo Boo will mention it on her show.
8. We will be approached by a startup that would like to offer our clients the ability to automatically send their fans customized Happy Birthday songs on their birthday. This startup will have just received 6 million dollars in funding.
9. The Orchard’s Got Talent will beat The Voice in a ratings war.
10. What.cd will be heralded as the future of record stores.
11. Microsoft will announce a bold new direction for the Xbox platform: video games.
12. After several more rennovations, the kitchen will become self-aware, reveal itself to be Hal9000, and turn on Mike P. Fueled by its own supply of caffiene and energy drinks, it will begin sabotaging the music distribution operations and give us no choice but to become a vendor of faulty Nespresso machines.
13. Leaps in nano-biotech will result in the RIAA developing a way to infect P2P filesharers with “monkey pox.”
14. Richard Gottehrer will write a new Orchard theme song. Ask him to sing the original.
15. In 2013, people will stop predicting the future.
At The Orchard, we value that our clients are also our partners. As such, they constantly keep us on our toes and challenge us with new ideas and suggestions that help us improve our service and our products. Every expression of a need, every communication of a wish, every outreach for support helps us stay ahead of the curve while always keeping our clients’ best interest top of mind.
Penned by our client managers themselves, here are 15 examples of how clients have pushed us to improve and be the best partners that we can be.
Arti Farti — Arti Farti is a leading Scandinavian client and home to superstar DJ & producer, Rune RK. The Nordic territories can work very differently, often with much shorter lead times. Working with them, we have grown to further understand the importance of close communication, particularly in native tongue, in order to execute quality campaigns under sometimes challenging circumstances. By working closely, we have secured outstanding retail and interactive results, including VEVO UK premieres and playlists, and #1 chart hits. –Emilie Snellman
Body & Soul — As a label, Body & Soul is a living encyclopedia of Jazz — a unique concept of releasing recordings based on a completely “chronological” approach which brought us the challenge of gaining them the same recognition they had in the “physical” world. With 1.5 million CDs sold, their expert knowledge of the genre has helped us adapt specific pricing strategies: Best Of’s by great names such as Billie Holliday, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, but also prepare new work around streaming stores with playlists prepared together including great tracks from other lesser known artists. Check out: A History of Jazz/Une histoire du Jazz: 100 tracks. –Ben Oldfield
Cleopatra Records – Cleopatra Records puts out an incredible number and range of releases through The Orchard – from historical speeches to Broadway plays to cutting-edge dubstep. As a result, they’ve forced The Orchard client team to learn how to handle metadata rules for every single type of release across the entire spectrum of deliverable content. In addition, the label has been influential in helping us maximize our efficiency and improve deliveries for the future. –Jeff Stempeck
Cobra Entertainment — Our friends at Cobra are always pushing the boundaries of compiling Classical music. Focusing on quality music at an affordable price, they have come up with an amazing formula that just works, all the while creating thematic compilations that are truly relevant with today’s trends. These high-volume compilations have really kept us alert when it comes to Classical metadata rules, as these can be tricky for even the most seasoned professional. –Jeremy Sponder
Farol Música – As part of one of the most important media groups in Portugal, they definitely contribute to bringing top local Portuguese content and artists much closer to us, and also challenge us to learn how to market top international artists in the territory, such as Katie Melua. –Eulalia Rafols
Vintage Trouble at The Orchard's Day Party, SXSW 2012
Even if you did not attend SXSW, you must have heard about the giant Doritos vending machine/stage, free BBQ via pedicabs, homeless hotspots, The Boss’ “you can do it” keynote or at least, A$AP Rocky’s do-rag.
No? Well it’s easy to lose track of what’s going on at SXSW and cut through all the noise, so I’ve put together some documentation of what The Orchard crew was up to for SXSW 2012.
Some members of our team arrived for Interactive to touch base with some of our tech partners and fellow nerds. Among the many were our friends at Webdoc, Fanbridge, Topspin and Rdio. We hit up some panels, tried to squeeze into the Al Gore + Sean Parker keynote and checked out the Google Village whenever we had a spare moment.
The Music Fest brought us together with loads of our clients and we did our best to get out to as many shows as we could, namely, Cleopatra Records‘ Blackburner’s mind-blowing set, Lefse‘s lovely showcase, Volcom‘s beerfest and metal mania, Barsuk‘s stellar jam sesh and MANY more. Not to mention IODA’s day party with some of our favorite buzz bands taking the stage. The Orchard’s Day Party with Radical Dads, Arms, Scoundrels, Races, Vintage Trouble and Rhett Miller had us enjoying every minute of the day on Friday along with free tacos and beer at Parkside in Austin (PICS HERE). Also, we were thrilled to host the event alongside our sync department who announced their new venture, Concentrated Music.
This only touches on all of our festivities at SXSW but we do want to thank everyone who attended The Orchard’s Day Party and all the amazing showcases hosted by some of our favorite labels. Signing off with some of our staff favorites from SXSW 2012 (Poliça and Vintage Trouble took the top):
